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

[Samana76]

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.

[Derek Cook]

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.

[tsss27]

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.

[matroswe]

Thank you! 
Looking forward to you next post!

[didacticoverworld]

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.

sprunki mustard

I tested it the way you described and the original pattern disappeared

[Samana76]

Hello Everyone,

I'm sorry, I have been/am travelling for work and have not gotten around to updating this thread. When I return home, in a few weeks, I will write about how to access the SSD drive.

I appreciate everyone's interest and sharing knowledge and experience on this topic.

Cheers.

[matroswe]

Hello Everyone,

I'm sorry, I have been/am travelling for work and have not gotten around to updating this thread. When I return home, in a few weeks, I will write about how to access the SSD drive.

I appreciate everyone's interest and sharing knowledge and experience on this topic.

Cheers.

Sounds good.
Were you able to expand the partitions on the drive after cloning?
I have done those type of things on Korg-gear for years, but they are Linux based and gparted is your friend.

[bechtelar2]

Hello Everyone,

I'm sorry, I have been/am travelling for work and have not gotten around to updating this thread. When I return home, in a few weeks, I will write about how to access the SSD drive.

I appreciate everyone's interest and sharing knowledge and experience on this topic.

Cheers.

Sounds good.
Were you able to expand the partitions on the drive after cloning?
I have done those type of things on Korg-gear for years, but they are Linux based and gparted is your friend.

I haven't expanded the partitions on my Prophet X yet, but I’m really interested in your method. If you used gparted successfully, that’s promising. I’d love to hear about any specific steps you took or challenges you faced. It’s great to see the community sharing experiences like this.

[Lady Gaia]

I haven't expanded the partitions on my Prophet X yet, but I’m really interested in your method. If you used gparted successfully, that’s promising. I’d love to hear about any specific steps you took or challenges you faced. It’s great to see the community sharing experiences like this.

The partition table, which is what gparted edits, is a relatively minor part of the puzzle.  All that does is record how the space on the disk is allocated into a series of reserved spaces.  It's useful to ensure that nobody steps on a part of the disk that is occupied by a filesystem – but it's entirely distinct from the filesystem's internal representation of how it uses that reserved space.  It's largely there to make sure nobody else wades into an area of the disk containing a filesystem they don't understand.

The QNX filesystem is the much harder part, because it's a proprietary commercial affair that contains its own map of available space which also needs to be modified to know about the larger available partition.  The only open source implementations of this filesystem that I'm aware of are read-only, and even the commercial operating system doesn't have tools to resize an existing partition.  The best option, in theory, would probably be to format a brand new partition of the appropriate type using a QNX distribution and to copy everything into it.

[matroswe]

The QNX filesystem is the much harder part, because it's a proprietary commercial affair that contains its own map of available space which also needs to be modified to know about the larger available partition.  The only open source implementations of this filesystem that I'm aware of are read-only, and even the commercial operating system doesn't have tools to resize an existing partition.  The best option, in theory, would probably be to format a brand new partition of the appropriate type using a QNX distribution and to copy everything into it.

This is basically how far I have come in my own investigation. I was merely refering to how is done on Korg gear like Kronos and Nautilus. It seems to depend in what version if QNX the PX is using for one.

[cuckoo]

Hello Everyone Escape Road City

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.

Being able to replace the original samples with a custom sound library opens up a whole new world of creative possibilities for Prophet X users.

[tweimann]

I’ve been experimenting on my own PX and had similar experiences to what some of you mentioned. I haven’t gone as deep into the QNX filesystem yet, but I did manage to clone and boot from a larger SSD without issues (Samsung 870 EVO here). So far, I’ve only been working within the existing partitions, but I’m really intrigued by the idea of creating a new one and migrating the content.

One thing I noticed when trying to overwrite factory samples is that naming consistency is really sensitive. Like someone else mentioned above, even a small variation in how the .grp files are formatted can result in duplicates or the factory entry not being properly replaced. I had some luck using a hex editor to peek into the structure and tweak the name fields for clarity, but I’d love to know if anyone has a cleaner workflow for that.

Also curious—has anyone successfully restored their SSD image after one of these mods and verified full function on the PX side? Just trying to gauge how bulletproof the backup/restore process really is before I go further with it.

Looking forward to more updates from OP once you're back. This feels like one of the last big frontiers on this synth, and it’s exciting to see the community starting to break it open.

[tsss27]

Regarding naming, I already have a folder with all 800-something instruments named identically to the factory set. The sample inside is a tiny file, not even 1 KB in size. So technically you can overwrite any individual samples this way, or the whole thing as I did...you just delete the files you don't want to overwrite before copying to the PX.

I have backed up the factory image and copied it to another SSD, but it was the standard Intel one that Sequential uses (somehow I ended up with a duplicate drive for free from Sequential.) In this way, as I experimented with building my library, if I wanted to start over I could do so easily. It works flawlessly...never tried with a larger drive as the people I talked to who work with QNX said expanding the partitions was not possible once the image is created.

At this point, I am actually more curious if it's possible to increase the amount of RAM, or to find a way to increase loading speed of samples, but I doubt these will be realistic. What I've noticed is that with large sample sets with many layers that are over 1 GB in size (I.E. pianos) the synth loads the loudest and quietest layers near instantly, and then fills in the others over time as you play. This gives the impression that load times are faster than they actually are. I tested this with the factory SSD before messing with anything and the results are the same. This is why sometimes as you scroll through the factory sounds, the pianos can sound very unevenly sampled at first...keep playing a key up and down in velocity for a while and you'll hear more layers begin to fill in.

[LTsad]

Regarding naming, I already have a folder with all 800-something instruments named identically to the factory set. The sample inside is a tiny file, not even 1 KB in size. So technically you can overwrite any individual samples this way, or the whole thing as I did...you just delete the files you don't want to overwrite before copying to the PX.

Hi there, it must have been a lot of work to compile this list! Would you be willing to share it? Would be very useful for anyone on this forum looking to use the limited PX drive space more efficiently. Thanks!