Hi Fran,
You can load a style from a floppydisk to
the keyboard and save it from there to the
ZIPdisk. I nearly do it everyday and I do not
have or use a RDBM. A RDBM program can be an
extra help for doing things on the computer.
But using and loading from and saving to a
ZIPdisk is perfectly possible on the keyboard
itself.

By the way, software update 2.0 encloses a function called "Music Assistant" which is very similar to the Style Database and allows you to select User Programs directly from the Zip disk, with the following advantages (according to Roland):
- you can transfer realtime User Program management to portable zip disks (which allows you to perform using any VA7-VA76 without having first to reprogram it)
- a speed-up of the response in live playing because you can now select from a vast array of registrations that goes far beyond the 128 internal memories.
The Music Assistan is to User Programs what the Disk User/Style Database functions are to Music Styles: by selecting a User Program on the Zip disk via the Music Assistant you load its settings to the User Program Area of the VA7 and (according to Roland) there is no need to write this User Program to an internal memory slot because the access to the Music Assistant itself is even quicker.

Floppy Styles to Zip...Not having a Zip Drive on my PC.....To copy styles from Floppy to Zip my EM2000 and I assume G1000 & VA's is the same. You can mark up to 20 styles and transfer from floppy to Zip in one go. Some times my board decides it has run out of memory, but by marking just 10 styles at a time everything copies fine.

Graham