Hi George, my name is Frank from CT. I won a car stereo shop. The only place around me that has any kind of keyboards is Sam Ash. Yesterday I had to educate them on the 9000Pro. I even stupidly tried to explain about the Solton SD-1. I need help, I own a Triton Pro and a EM-2000.
I am looking to keep the Triton as my home board, and get either a 9000pro and or SD-1 for gigging. We use alot of midi file playback from Trantracks and my own personall. We are a Italian/american band. I need quick access to songs and the ability to search for the next song while the current song is playing. My EM-2000 have all the saongs on zip which is great, how do you recomend if I get one of thsoe keyboards I could transfer the songs.
any help would be aprecciated it thanks

Frank,
Your educating the store you went to has been a major issue with customers and manufactures over the past several years, especially this past year with a few chain's opening up more and more stores here in the US.
More and more I hear from Players, hobbiests and Manufactures that the "big box store" mentality can be the biggest problem our industry is facing. More and more, large chains open up new stores. Not always has this been shown to be a wise decision. Not all newly opened store around the country are doing very well according to industry professionals. At times I think this has become a war of the "Giants" to see who can become the "king of the mountain". Many times, finding quality sales people can be a real problem. I have found this in most every kind of business I walk into lately.. I have fewer choices in Grocery Stores, and fewer Banks to choose from. I used to have many small camera stores to go into where I could walk outside and try out a new lens or talk to the guy behind the counter about what is the right lens for me, etc. The small corner hardware store is almost gone here in Los Angeles, and when I have to go to the giant electronic stores I either get no help or poor help because the saleperson just doesn't know what he or she is selling. This is not the way it is in every store, but I think many of you have experienced the same treatment as I have. I sense from the customers that walk into my store, that most those interested in arranger keyboards especially, still want a store where questions can be asked and answered and the ability to demo a product well and features explained is still a much in demand comodity. It is interesting to know that when a young teenager comes in with a couple of friends to see electric guitars and amps and after they have removed a couple of guitars and I ask if I can be of any assistance, they get mad because I don't want the guitars I am going to sell to be scratched or banged by their not being carful, their response is "let's go to the "chain" store where we can do anything we want". My response to these young customers is "take a look at the instruments you are buying at those stores" and look at how badly damaged many of their products are and how very few have been set up and adjusted, and that this is why I want to be so careful with my guitars so you can buy a really nice one when you are ready". The big stores just don't work this way. Maybe it's good and maybe it's not, but this is the only way I know how to do business and it is the only way I would want to do business. I know many of you say the small guy can't compete in prices compared to the .com company's and mail order, but in many cases, prices have become very similar if you buy from a smaller store, and many times the service far outways a small difference in cost. I can only speak from my heart and what I see as a growing problem in the music industry. We are still an industry of highly technical products that usually require a great deal of education and support. Well........ enough lecturing.
Now, getting to your question regarding the transfer of midi files. You have a couple of different choices for copying your midi files from the Roland keyboard.
First, the easiest, if you buy the 9000 pro would be to go into the disk utility of the em2000 which allows copying from one zip id # to a destination zip id#. I haven't tried this direct to the 9000pro but I do this all the time with an external SCSSI disk drive in my store. I first select all songs to copy and then execute the transfer which works great. The long way to do this would be to select about 25 songs at a time and copy them to a floppy disk which you would then copy to the 9000 or SD-1. The solton SD-1 does not have a SCSSI option so I just copy my disk to the hard drive. this is quite simple to do and you can copy a whole disk at a time, but does require a lot of time. One of my customers, Paul Ip, has informed me of a European company who sells a software/hardware program which lets you use an external hard drive and directly copy the contents of one hard drive, zip, etc. into a formated hard drive. You can get more information on this from Paul, who is a frequent writer in this forum. He has helped me quite often with technology questions and is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to using computers with music.
When Paul was here in California several months ago and he saw that I was copying one disk at a time, he explained to me how easy it would be to use the computer to duplicate hard drives. About a month ago he told me of this company supplying all the neccessary componants for doing this.
Paul, if you are seing this post response, please let us know the details for doing this and now that you have the PSR9000 am I correct about being able to copy from the zip of the Roland EM2000 directly to the hard drive of the PSR9000 through the SCSSI port? Have you tried this? Thanks for your help!
George Kaye

Thanks George,
I have the same situation at my store going against the Circiut Cities and so forth.
How much are u selling the 9000pro for?
You can email me direct if you don't want to post it frankieve@snet.net. You probably know the quality of SMF playback on the EM-2000, I know Korg and GEM playback does not come close, how are the 2 we are talking about?

thanks again

George,

For Frankieve, I think the best method of song transfer from Roland EM2000 to Yamaha 9000 Pro is using an external SCSI Zip drive. I actually have an older Zip Plus drive that is both parallel and SCSI (with a special adapter). All that Frankieve has to do is to hook up an external SCSI Zip drive to his EM2000 keyboard, making sure that the SCSI ID does not conflict with the internal one (if the SCSI ID of EM2000 internal ZIP drive is 5, then set the SCSI ID of the external SCSI Zip drive to 6). Mount the external SCSI Zip drive and just select all MIDI files from the internal SCSI Zip drive and copy them to the external SCSI Zip drive. After the files have been copied, Frankieve can then hook up the external SCSI Zip drive to the SCSI port of the Yamaha 9000 Pro for copying the MIDI files.

There are two limitations of MIDI files on current Yamaha PSR9000 / 9000 Pro keyboards:
1. Each hard disk folder/directory can only hold up to 250 files;
2. At current OS level, there is no provision of chain playing MIDI files.

As for Solton SD-1, since it does not have any SCSI connections, the above method does not work. Copying through floppy is the cheapest way in media, but most expensive in terms of time. I did mention a Germany company that manufactures USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface for PSR9000 and Korg I30, but I don't think they have anything for Solton X1/SD-1 yet. If you are interested you can follow the following older posting: http://www.synthworld.com/ubbs/Forum37/HTML/001050.html

I found a very effective way of duplicating notebook IDE hard drives. I bought a PCMCIA to notebook IDE drive enclosure, which came with drivers for me to use in Windows 9x command mode. The drive enclosure looks like this:

My notebook PC has a LS120 super floppy drive (120 MB per media, compatible with good old 3.5" floppies) with Windows 98 boot image, config.sys and autoexec.bat files that contains the PCMCIA to IDE enclosure support. Using software package like Norton Ghost, I am able to copy from partition of the source disk to an image file on the notebook PC's internal IDE disk. I recommend partitioning and formatting your new laptop IDE hard disk with your keyboard (if you purchase an optional hard disk for your keyboard that comes with nothing on it). Then swap out the source disk with a new/destination disk in the PCMCIA to IDE disk enclosure, I can clone a partition on the new/destination hard disk from the disk image file in less than 10 minutes. My PCMCIA to notebook IDE disk enclosure has never been really closed - I let it sit open so I can clone disks any time I want, like a disk cloning station, for ease of operations.

Since Solton SD-1 comes with a 6 GB internal IDE disk, I do not recommend disk cloning, but file appending. This is even easier. With the PCMCIA to notebook IDE disk enclosure, you can take out the SD-1 disk and put it in the enclosure. With a USB Zip drive, you can put the EM2000 Zip disk in so the Windows 98 notebook can copy all the MIDI files from the USB ZIP drive to the SD-1 hard disk in very easy Windows Explorer manipulation in a matter of a few minutes. The most time consuming portion is to take out the SD-1 hard disk, but this is only a one time deal. While the SD-1 hard disk is in the PCMCIA disk enclosure, all of its contents can be copied again into either a disk image file or actual files in a particular folder in the notebook PC, which you can eventually dump it into a CDR or CDRW media for cheap and reliable backup or disk cloning source.

I hope the above explains a little bit further so you understand how I clone/backup keyboard disks.

Regards,

Paul Ip
from Texas

Great explanation Paul. I knew you would be very helpful. I thank you for all your help.
Regards,
George

Hello Frank,
Yes, it is difficult to find salespeople at "Big Box" stores who know anything about arranger keyboards . However, I work for Guitar Center in Baltimore Maryland. I am the only Guitar Center to carry Ketron/Solton keyboards . I am also a Yamaha dealer .
Guitar Center offers a 30 day trial period on any keyboard. If you are not completely happy just return the keyboard to me or any Guitar Center in the country . For more information you can contact me at 1-410-821-5200 or email me at oneils4@home.com or guitarcenterdan@hotmail.com . I would be happy to preload all of your midi sequences you would like !
Now the SD1 has a 6 gig hard drive .Tremendous and direct access to any midi file directly off the hard drive !
Guitar Center also has a 30 price protection . Hope to hear from you . There is hope for Big Box stores . Sincerely, Dan O'Neil at Guitar Center Baltimore