How to replace factory samples – it’s incredibly simple!

How to replace factory samples – it’s incredibly simple!
« on: January 18, 2025, 10:39:37 AM »
Hello Everyone,

I’ve been following this forum for a couple of years and have owned my two Prophet Xs for about a year now. I would like to thank all the contributors of this forum for sharing their knowledge and developing tools that enhance the capabilities of this amazing instrument. I personally think the Prophet X is one of the best keyboards/synths ever made. As we all know it has its quirks and flaws, but what it offers and how it sounds greatly outweighs its flaws.

I now would like to give back to this community by sharing my knowledge on how to work around the hard drive limitations. It goes without saying that I assume no responsibility for any loss of data or damage you may incur with your instrument. I am simply sharing this information so that you may choose to do with your Prophet X whatever you want - you assume all responsibility of your actions.

Before you begin, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you clone the original Prophet X SSD drive as an image file to your computer. Should anything happen, you can always restore the original image back to the SSD. In addition, I recommend that you do not use the original SSD to work with. I suggest you make an image of the original Prophet X SSD, store the original SSD safely in a drawer, then restore that image to another SSD. Any SSD larger than 240GB will work (I restored the image to a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD). Also, backup all programs (User, Factory, and Add-Ons) via Sysx to your computer. Keep all this information neatly in a folder on your computer so that you can restore the Prophet X to the state it was in before you attempted any changes. There are free and paid software cloning software for any computer platform. It is simple to do and you can find this online. Also, Sequential has a page on how to transfer patches to your computer via Sysx. Note that the patches are not stored on the computer motherboard or SSD, but on the synth side of the Prophet X.

OK, so now that you’ve cloned your SSD, reinstalled it in your Prophet X, turned your keyboard on and confirmed everything is exactly the same as it was before, how do you replace the factory samples? It is as simple as placing the samples on a USB stick, just like you would to add User samples, but instead of placing them in the folder px/u## all you have to do is put them in a folder called px/f00. That's it! On the Prophet X, go to Globals, Update Library, and select Factory, instead of User, and it will overwrite the Factory samples in the slots that you designated (ex. 02 Bass/02 My Own Bass). Note this process will overwrite the factory sounds and you cannot get them back. The only way you can get them back is by restoring the cloned image file back onto the SSD.

If you want to know how I learned this, I will write another post here below explaining how I was able to access the SSD file system on my computer, download all the contents (factory samples, add-on samples, everything) so that I can access them in Windows, and how I came to figure out this simple solution to give users the choice to overwrite the factory samples. For now I just wanted to share this information because I think many Prophet X owners have been wanting to do this for a long time. Note that I actually like the factory and add-on sounds and plan to keep them – my goal is to expand the samples partition to occupy the remaining 750GB of space on my SSD drive so that I could potentially add hundreds of GBs of samples.

Attached you will find photos of the process and a photo of the sample selection screen showing that I have the Replicants samples installed in the Factory Keyboard (F/10) and Synth (F/15) folders. I am also attaching a text document with the entire factory folder structure so that you know what you will be overwriting when you install your samples.

Hope you all enjoy this post and find it useful in opening new possibilities with your Prophet X.

Cheers.

Re: How to replace factory samples – it’s incredibly simple!
« Reply #1 on: January 19, 2025, 12:55:51 AM »
Thanks for sharing. All further info gratefully received!

I write guides myself for things I have learnt to share with others, so always keen to see what others have learnt.
Regards
Derek

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Prophet X, Yamaha Montage 7, SY99, TG77, EX5R, AN1x, FS1r, Motif Rack ES (with PLG150-AN and PLG150-VL), Korg Kronos X61, Nord G2 Engine, and way too many VSTis!

Re: How to replace factory samples – it’s incredibly simple!
« Reply #2 on: January 26, 2025, 08:10:15 PM »
As someone who has spent time overwriting the factory library completely, I would like to ask you if you actually tried this.
This was my first experiment back when I began to try to delete the 8Dio content. What actually happened was it created 2 duplicate entries in the factory bank with the same number. This happened even when the sample names were the same as the factory ones. There is a simple way to fix this, which requires changing the character which separates the "instrument" and "name" fields inside the zip file (so the folder within, and the .grp file.)
If you have actually tested this the way you describe, and the factory sample did disappear, I am quite curious how that is because my unit does not behave this way. You have to make a duplicate copy of the factory library first, with the correct characters in the zip archives, and erase them that way, then that will free up the space so you can copy new samples of your own. However, references to the factory samples are still there, they are just empty.

Re: How to replace factory samples – it’s incredibly simple!
« Reply #3 on: February 05, 2025, 09:30:14 AM »
Thank you!  :D
Looking forward to you next post!
« Last Edit: February 05, 2025, 09:31:47 AM by matroswe »