Aksy

Aksy is a 'sound-alike' of actie in Dutch, which means "Action" in English.

Many hardware vendors provide software with their products, but unfortunately this software is often only released once, and not maintained. Ak.sys, the software provided with the Akai Z-series samplers, is one of them. Ak.sys is good for many tasks, but lacks any automation of repetitive tasks - and it doesn't run on Linux.

Aksy hopes to fill this gap - as it was conceived as a cross-platform library, written in Python, with a small layer written in C for the USB communication. At the moment it supports the Z4,Z8 and MPC-4000, with rudimentary support for S5000/S6000.

I hope more vendors will release this kind of software, which isn't generating revenue anyway, in an open-source fashion in the future.

Aksy is licensed under GPL v2 or later.

Features

• Quickly and reliably transfer files from and to sampler using USB. Uploads have been tested with files up to 445MB with an observed transfer rate between 677kB/s and 720kB/s

• Access almost all sysex functionality provided by hundreds of Akai system exclusive commands.

• Use Python to talk to your sampler. Python is a friendly language which is easy to read and understand - and examples are included!

• Cross platform, should run on Windows, MacOSX, Linux (and all Unix flavours for which libusb and Python are available).

• Full OSC support

• AksyFS: mount the sampler's memory and disks as a file system on the host system (uses FUSE, which is currently not yet available on Windows platforms).

Current development

• Aksui, a cross-platform alternative for ak.Sys by Joe Misra, built on top of Aksy

Downloads

The AksyReleases page contains the current releases.

Source

The source code is available through the subversion repository at http://source.n--tree.net/svn/aksy/

Documentation

• Installation
• AksyConfiguration
• AksyBaseTools
• AksyFS
• Aksui

Howtos

• LinuxRunningAsUser Running as non-root user on Linux

Communication

If you want to discuss development, share ideas, ask questions, you're invited to join the mailing list at http://lists.n--tree.net/listinfo/aksy

Related Projects (Linux only)

Khagan (http://khagan.berlios.de/), an OSC enabled interface builder, can be used in conjunction with aksy to create a custom UI for your sampler.

Freecycle (http://freecycle.redsteamrecords.com/) is an OSS alternative for Recycle.