Hope K2000

[Efraine Ton]

Irecently finished studying for the 70-680 exam, and thought it would be interesting to set up a WDS server. Our ESXI cluster has plenty of resources and we have the licenses so I didn't see any reason why not to. There were a few moments where I stumbled into success, but for the most part it wasn't that bad to set up WDS, MDT 2012, and the Windows AIK to work on Server 2008 R2 Standard. I've since deployed 12 production machines using this method. Start to finish it takes about 20 minutes to complete. I know that everyone says that the K2000 is a very powerful appliance that makes deployment a breeze, but how does it differ from pushing a custum sysprepped wim from WDS?

I feel the big advantage for us is I can use student workers with very little training to deploy images from the k2000 vs wds. The scripting makes the tasks easier. I have 78 images and 80 percent of them share common tasks that I can change very quickly via Kace if needed. The other advantage here is Desktop support has control over the k2000 enviroment not the server team were if it were on a WDS server we have none.

Conceptually they are not that far apart. What I hear from most people though is that updating the drivers can be a bit cumbersome whereas the K2000 (if you are primarily a Dell shop) has the Driver Feed that makes driver deployment a lot easier.

I would prefer the K2. Integration K1 and K2. Post Install Tasks. If you ever had systems with real RAID CONTROLLERS (long time ago they were called 333 controllers because of: a real raid controller has at minimum: 1 channel, 32MB RAM and costs 300 bucks) and not the onboard stuff or similar you will love pre install tasks.

Well, I am not a real fan of Images, as images are fast but inflexible as you need to modify the image every couple of days if something has changed or you will need many steps after deploying them. If you have many different systems you may need many different images or work hard to get a master image.

I thank everyone for the responses to this question. It has given me some insight to what all the rave is about with the K2000. There are a lot of ways to deploy an image. Up until a few days ago we were still using Ghost and had to maintain an image for each different hardware configuraiton. So the step to WDS was huge for us to only have 1 image to manage. I can now see how the K2000 with or without the K1000 integration is quite a powerful appliance in it's own right. It sounds better than WDS if you need the ability to make a mass change in a matter of minutes. It also seems to have the ability to get granular if need be. Thank you everyone for the great responses!

The K2000 has a huge system exclusive implementation, but it was never released which left the KRZ community outraged for years and made using the synth difficult in some aspects ie real time envelope control etc. I, and others I know, and probably a large amount of KRZ users out there have always wanted a way to control the K2000 in real time in every aspect, and even tho it has a huge midi implementation from CC's it doesnt cover everthing, some areas are badly lacking!

I have had this folder sitting on my PC I found ages ago which is a bunch of .h files and a compiler file and some other stuff inc a readme. This folder contains some code which aparently would allow you to develop an editor which uses the whole sysex implementation of the K2000. Im thinking it may have been made for use on an old mac as there is reference to 68K as a CPU??? Im just guessing.

If people dont mind, can you download this and tell me what is possible, in laymans terms (im not a programmer) bearing in mind that I would love to see this implemented somehow into a MIOS controller ie MB 64e or similar as a sysex editor for the K2000 synth. Even just a way to get this info to spit out all the sysex destinations for me to program up another editor (Kenton Control Freak or Reaktor or something) would be a huge leap in the right direction!! In fact, any comment by anyone who knows what there talking about might help me to see how to make any use of these files.

I have a 2500 rack and had the 2000 rack before it, along with Opcode's Galaxy Plus Editors package with the K2000 module. Haven't needed the 2500 as much (thanks to the DAW), but I ran the older stuff a bit, along with many an old 68k Mac. I thought Unisyn and/or SoundDiver had full editors for the Kurz as well now. ???

Don't know if it was the old Mac hardware, the Kurzweil processor (coincidentally an 68040 I think), or just the MIDI bandwidth itself, but the one thing I do remember was that it updated like a slug. I'm guessing MIDI, as the Kurz itself was pretty tolerable in that regard using the panel controls. It was neat having a nice GUI and all, but the heavy streams of data really knocked the system on it's butt. I'd have to check into it again with an updated host (maybe PC), but I have a gut feeling it wasn't the host. I wish SMDI had covered that sort of stuff too. Kurzweil were one of the early adopters of it, and it really took the sample dump thing to the next level. Probably would've worked wonders for SysEx.

Good to hear that theres other K users out there! You should give it a go again for sure. What OS version do you have? Great leaps were made in the final updates for both units. Funny as I have been in 68K mac world with them too :) I have always found them to be very good machines if you stay within the polyphony boundaries. VAST is, VAST and could be explored a lot more with a hardware editor. I do know that the GUI of the K2000 and maybe 2500 is slow to update the screen, but I think you would find that its actual processing does not suffer from this lag, only the screen refresh. Im thinking of an editor that is able to be used without needing to see the Kurzweil, and hence this problem wouldnt matter.

I know there are a range of software based editors out there, but it is my dream to not have to have a PC in sight of my studio. Ive been down the PC path as far as it goes, and I found no satisfaction when comparing it to the hands on feel of the hardware. It has its advantages, and I wont knock it, but its just not the same to me.

I'll have to check on the OS, but it will likely be the latest (for the 2500RS). I'm not sure I did much SysEx after I got the 25. The 2K was right at the point I moved to ProTools (yuck >:() and wasn't needing as much sampler. I doubt the 25 is much faster with the big streams though. BTW- I seem to recall them sharing much of the SysEx code (I hope that's right). I think there were "2K only" editors which still worked on the 2500.

Any particular areas you were looking for control of? I do remember using the LP/HP filters and some of the EQ blocks. Also, yes, I do remember the effects being a bit "gritty". When the 25 came out, there was an option for "real" built-in effects with a card or something, but I've had digital out and DAW stuff, so it wasn't worth that much. Never did get that DMTi either (seems sort of pointless now though).

PS- You want to see a s l o w screen refresh, you ought to check out the Roland E-660 parametric. Thing made me want to jump out a window. ;D It puts an actual friggin graphic curve on an LCD to represent the settings and comes from the late 80's or really early 90's (if you can imagine what that amounts to). Shame you can't overclock stuff like that, or better yet, upgrade the CPU. The one in the Kurzweil's probably worth about 50 cents now, and I think at the time, it was a couple notches above the one in the shipping Macs (Mac Quadras maybe).

The .h files describe the data structures and the manual has the encoding of 8 bit bytes to MIDI sysex, so in theory that's all you need. But i don't know enough to about the synth to make a sysex message from scratch. Do you by chance have any hex dumps of sysex messages? Perhaps from a PC based editor? If i had one to decode it should give me a better understanding of how it all works.

No, it's just the 2500RS. Didn't mean to knock it like that. It's actually one of the most respected pieces of hardware I own. I've just been neglecting it lately. I've been slowly working on a workstation thing in the corner of my tracking room where it will end up. I'm hoping to get back to more musical stuff and thinking a dedicated sequence area with a bit of "real" hardware might help. ;)

John- It turned out to be running version 3.02 of the OS. I still haven't checked an editor with it. I may try that tonight, but I'm sort of worried about the current MIDI interface out there (a MOTU parallel MicroExpress). They've been known to mangle many a SysEx message.

Yeh I shoulda put a smiley after that sorry! I was just joking about me getting a freebie ;) I'm a big fan of the K2* series but never could afford the one I want... probably cause they just keep improving it :)

Thats ok stryd_one, I think everyone knows youve got a good tone to your messages :) I had a quiet laugh!!! Buy a K2000, there 70% as good as a K2600 and 5% of the cost. Ive got 2 of them and when you look at bang for the buck, 16 outputs, 48note polyphony, 2 multi fx engines, 128mb of ram (plus a whole wack of other options I wont even go into) all in the VAST system... You can get 2 of them for around or less than $1000 these days which is pretty decent. Jidis Im still working on getting you the sysex file, I should have it tonight, I just cant pully myself away from my new sid im building :)

PS Stryd_one, Ive been LMAO with your latest sets of footers on your messages too.. hehehe Esp the one about the search and wtfm :) As geeky as we all are its nice to see a sense of humour in all this!!

John- Looking around a bit at some Kurz info. It may not have been all that much of an 040 at all. Maybe a 25MHz or something?? Still good for back then, just sucks that they aren't socketed like all our other stuff. IIRC, it may not have been the exact same version of the 040 that was in a Mac. Motorola had all these weird 040LC's and stuff. It could've been a DSP optimized one or something (who knows). Doesn't mean all that much when you think about it anyway. The Universal Audio cards and those lovely plugs I like so much are running on a CPU which was made for some sort of antique PCI video card. :D

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