Alesis PCMCIA

The Alesis PCMCIA standard was used across the Alesis Quadrasynth series as a way to expand the number of editable on-board presets and mixes, or as a way to include new waveforms to be used with the QS composite synthesis engine. It supported up to 8 MB of any mixture of aforementioned extra content.

Unlike other contemporaries, such as the Roland SR-JV80 series, users were free and encouraged to create their own cards with their own samples, and additionally had support for SampleCell formatted files. A compact disc containing the necessary software for both Windows-based systems and Apple Macintosh computers was frequently included with most Alesis Quadrasynth purchases.

Official cards

Alesis also provided a number of official card expansions, albeit their rarity makes any information very hard to come by in terms of exact preset/mix counts and waveform additions. (to do: make a table for this i think it'd be great but also add tables for "generic" cards to detail how many patches/mixes these could *store*)

Oddities

Despite the standard being comparatively more permissive, in today's world it is very difficult to find compatible PCMCIA flash cards - it requires a specific type of Linear Flash cards, which were only produced by AMD and Intel. It was noted in a Sound on Sound article how difficult this was by the time the QSx.2 upgrades arrived on the market as early as 2003.

External Links

Ben Weaver - Alesis Hardware Hacks