Interesting topic. So, if my kbd has a hard drive and the backed ram installed as well, could I bypass the laptop and just record waves or download other audio files by conecting my kbd to my home pc and saving them to the hard drive inside my kbd?

Thanks in advance!

Most audio files are at least 3-4 MB, even in a compressed form. The WMA's seem to be the smallest, with the best sound quality, but an MP3 recorded at 320kb is almost CD quality.
Midi files are a personal thing. Most people just download them and try to play along with them. I've made many of my own audio trax, but very few midi files. I usually take out the melody, the piano and whatever other junk I don't like and rely on the basic rhythm section to accompany me.
I use big production sounds when it's called for ... Disco, some Big Bands, Novelty songs. I love introducing "Dualing Banjo's" as the "Love Theme" from ..... (pause 4 effect ...........) Deliverence !
Then I play the guitar part while the pc plays the banjo. It keeps me amused, and breaks up the night.
I go through phases with smf's - Sometimes I use them all night, and other times ... I NEVER use one ! It's all about a mood. The room "tells" me what it needs each night. I just follow directions !

I heard from Ryan today - He got all the gear we shipped from Philly & California .... now we're just waitin' on the Yamaha guys to show up with the Keyboard and survival kit !
C' mom guys .... the poor kid's about to burst with anticip..................................

I have a midi cable that connects to the game port of my desktop pc. What kind of cable would I need to achieve midi connection to/from a laptop (the laptop I have in mind has serial, parallel, usb, and firewire ports).
Thanks,
Deaton

So far, Fran Carango has the only laptop I've seen that can use that joystick cable. Most of the rest need a dedicated midi interface of some sort, or a pc "to host" cable. This is only good if your slave source has the same pc connector.
You can get a "cigarette box" type adapter, or a pcmcia type. I have the EXP Midi Traveler, a pcmcia card that gives me a joystick end, and two midi ends.

my middle machine has a joystick/midi port (one of the reasons I chose it) but this is difficult to find now, and not really necessary any more.

cheapest option for midi is a host cable to the serial port, if your keyboard has the required socket.
then a midiman interface or similar to usb (easiest) or parallel port (edirol have nice cable/controllers for usb, though you might find cheaper).
then a pcmcia card just for midi like UD. You can spend more and get a hardware wavetable in the card too for more polyphony or better voices.

I use my laptop too as a phrase sampler and midifile player. I had a problem of connecting my keyboard to it because it doesn't have a pc-to-host connector. I thought of getting pcmcia midi connector but its a little pricey. I remember that I have a little sound module about the same size as my laptop gathering dust in my garage. This module solved my problem because it has pc-to-host connection to hook up with my laptop's serial port. Then from there I can route the midi out (5-pin DIN) of the module and connect my keyboard's midi in. This module (Korg AG10) sounds better than my laptop's sound chip when playing midifiles. I don't know if you can still find this module but I bought it cheap when it first came out.

I can't remember who pointed that out to me, but THANX ! (it WAS someone from this forum ! )
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You are welcome U.D. and amm glad you found WMA files good.

I posted about their advantages since all being mentioned in the forum at that time was MP3's.

I found about WMA files when trying to find alternatives to the MP3 encoder which I had downloaded (It was one of the best recommended at that time). However, at that time that MP3 encoder had a bug which actually did shift the Key in which I had played the song when converting a WAV file to MP3! I couldn't beleive it and after being sure of it sent them an email about it.

WMA files are not only shorter that MP3 but have higher resolution too. The windows media player nicely can take a CD and automatically creates WMA files with so little space that I now just store the CD away.