Hope this helps Vsampler fans

I had a few Akai and Vsampler instruments that recently stopped working when vsampler stopped working altogether.  Not sure when, but a few weeks back vsampler 3.5 full version started crashing my computer and Sonar.  I can't really remember the last time I used VS, but it was working stand alone and with the 32 bit wrapper in Sonar for quite a while. No worries, I thought I have Kontakt and it will convert anything (at least according to their web page).  Alas, I could not get Kontakt to see my .iso Akai samples and Vs3 samples.  Vsampler still could read then and load the samples, it just could not work in Sonar or stand-alone.  (interestingly, Win 10 would not even mount the .iso files and said they were corrupted, but Vsampler had no problems loading them.)
 
I tried a bunch of different things and here is how I got the samples back.
 
1) Loaded them in Vsampler. 
2) Exported the samples from VS and saved then as sf2 files.
3) Downloaded and installed a program call Plogue Sforzando
4) Imported the sf2 files into Sforzando, and it automatically converted them to sfz format.
       Note - I tried to get Kontakt 5 to convert the sf2 files into .nki  but it kept crashing or made an unplayable mess of them.
5) Plogue Sforzando is free 64 bit vst and stand alone app.  Works great in Sonar.
      Note - Rgc Audio SFZ that comes with Sonar would load the converted sfz files, but would not play them...no audio came out. Did not spend a lot of time finding out why, as Sforzando is a much better program.
 
About 80% of the .iso and vsampler files converted 100%.  
The other 20%  have "missing loop points" but they still play, not sure what the warning is about or how it impacts...but these samples are not key for me.
 
Any rate hope this helps.
 
JR