I own a Technics KN5000 and recently spent some time trying to find a Win 2000 driver for the PC to Host Port feature.

Well, as per usual, manufacturer and reseller support was not forthcoming, so i just went ahead and tried a few things myself.

It seemed obvious that the cable required was a standard 9pin serial to 8 pin DIN serial cable - I had a few around from various pieces of equipment, but they should be readily available.

If it was standard, then seemingly a standard Midi to serial would also work!

I just installed the Roland Serial to Host Driver (available from their site) and it worked perfectly.

I would assume the case would be much the same for other keyboards with this feature.


Regards

Klaus

Hi Klaus, How are things going with you along the beautiful Great Barrier Reef (Cairns) of Australia? Great to see your post here and glad to see you are still playing your Technics KN5000 and I assume gigging and keeping the tourists happy with it as well. THANKS for sharing the very VALUABLE tip on the PC to Host Port issue.
- Scott http://scottyee.com

Thanks Scott - good to see you are keeping the music chat alive! Yes the Reef is the second best place in the world .. next to the Bay of course :-)

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I might add that my Host Port tip came about from the need to plug into the Laptop while gigging. I never went down the internal Hard Disk drive track for the KN5000, and chose to get a laptop instead.

I put Windows 2000 on it because it is more stable and faster than the Win9* platform (only faster if you install it on a FAT drive not NTFS). You need at least 64Meg RAM and (probably) at least a P266 MMX processor.

I use Van Basco's Karaoke player to play back the midi as i found it is the best for live work - allows playlists and on the fly tempo and key change and displays lyrics.

It also allows me to play MP3s in breaks etc.


Regards

Klaus

Van Basco's will run just fine on almost any Pentium PC. I use a 200Mh P1MMX without a hitch. We've had it running on as little as 90Mh Win95 too.