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Floppy disks created by an Ensoniq EPS/ASR cannot be read by a normal Windows computer. This is because Ensoniq samplers were made back in the time where floppy disk standards were not established yet. Since the Ensoniq EPS/ASR is really a specialized computer, and since the engineers really didn't forsee the need to have computers read the floppies, they came up with their own little 'private Idaho' format.

Some bright people in the '90's found a way to coax a PC computer to read the floppies, though. This was done using calls to DOS, to manipulate the floppy disk controller that it would read the floppy disks properly.

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An attempt to enhance the existing 3 1 ⁄ 2-inch designs was the SuperDisk in the late 1990s, utilizing very narrow data tracks and a high precision head guidance mechanism with a capacity of 120 MB and backward-compatibility with standard 3 1 ⁄ 2-inch floppies; a format war briefly occurred between SuperDisk and other high-density floppy.

Earlier versions of Ensoniq Disk Tools, running on Windows 98 and earlier, were able to makes these calls and read and write and format Ensoniq floppy disks. How, with the advent of the modern Windows operating systems such as XP and Vista, this went away. This is because XP and Vista (and 2000 and NT) no longer use the old MS-DOS operating system. Thus, the calls necessary to control the floppy disk controller didn't exist anymore.

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A concern called OmniFlop changed things, as they wrote a replacement floppy disk driver for modern Windows operating systems. So now floppy drive access is possible again, and all versions of Ensoniq Disk Tools after version 3 support the OmniFlop driver.

If you want to access Ensoniq floppies, you MUST install the OmniFlop driver. You can download it here: www.shlock.co.uk/Utils/OmniFlop/OmniFlop.htm Please install it by following their complete and thorough directions. After installing OmniFlop, Ensoniq Disk Tools will access floppies as normal. We apologize for not including the driver in our installer; however this is not permitted by OmniFlop's licensing terms. You must perform the install yourself. Their instructions are clear; please refer all install questions to them.

One further note: OmniFlop is known to run on 64-bit operating systems but you must download the 64-bit driver. Even so, we have heard of inconsistant results. This being what it is, we recommend that you use the floppy functions with nothing beyond Windows XP 32-bit. Thsi is good anyway, since most computers running Win7 and above do not have a floppy drive anyway.

Lastly, please note that USB floppy drives DO NOT WORK. You MUST use a internal floppy drive, operating off the internal floppy controller, on a PC itself (never a Mac running VM software). Both restrictions are firmware limitations that our products have no way of circumventing.

Proprietary floppy disk formats are highly unique in that the actual physical area that is marked off on the disk is a different cylindrical pattern than the standard 9-sector DOS format. Often they require 10-sectors, and the sector width on the disk is thinner. To read these floppies, the read/write head of the floppy must be instructed to move, park, and set in different ways. This requires access to the floppy controller, which is a chip containing firmware that be programmed to do so.

The standard floppy controller in PC's has been standardized over the years, early on, so that it has a set of protocols that allow messing with the physical behavior of the head to read/write these floppies.

Now, to explain the problems:

Mac's don't love floppies
Mac's with internal floppy drives (old Mac's!) can't read those type of floppies as their proprietary controller does not allow physical changes thorough software; or if it does, Apple never documented any API or methods how this is done.

USB Floppy Drives don't love proprietary floppies
USB floppy drives do not work the actual controller is within the USB drive/casing. It is not a standard floppy controller as far as we know; at the very least there is no API through USB that allows access to this firmware to allow changes. We're sure this is POSSIBLE if some manufacturer (usually in China or Korea) was good enough to innovate this, but the floppy drive market is for mass-production and the less compatibility, the better.

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Summary
Summarizing, all these floppy controllers (USB and Apples) are hard-set to read and write the standard 9-sector DOS floppy format, and can't be modified via software to read and write the 10-sector Ensoniq/Akai/Roland/other ones. Windows with a internal floppy controller (on the motherboard or a card slot) work because those floppy controllers have a standard method of controlling the physical mechanism of floppy drive itself.