Jos,
"If it had a built in laptop then you wouldn't be able to install the soundcard of your choice" . I need a work around solution. I don't want to carry a PC with a monitor/mouse,keyboard etc when i perform.
Star

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Originally posted by Jos;
"It it had a built in laptop then you wouldn't be able to install the soundcard of your choice. That's not good enough."
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It's probably using a pc keyboard, touchpad, lcd combo same as the one manufactured by KVM. It looks like a laptop but there's no cpu, hdd, memory. etc inside. And if you can put the microatx board inside the keyboard or synth and use this mouse-lcd-keyboard combo then it's posible to use any pci cards because it has a full motherboard inside.

Danb,

Can you identify the product that you are talking about? An URL or the name of the manufacturer?

Jos



[This message has been edited by Jos Maas (edited 09-08-2003).]

Hi Jos,
had a bit of time yesterday , to spend on your program. The actual arranger features don't particularly interest me, as I prefer to play an actual arranger keyboard, so I must admit , I haven't actually spent time on that part of the program.
The stylemaker part of your program is really impressive. Especially the feature that allows you to import and save individual phrases ( I think you call it morphing). It's a feature I really liked on my 9000pro ( called style assembly) and my kn7 has a similar features also.

I did try converting one of my kn7 styles( in midifile format) to psr. The particular style had additional "a" notes in a c chord guitar strum. Your program must have deleted them, as originally it was a 5 note strum , but after converting, there were only 4 notes left. Even so, in this instance, it was still quite useable.

My aim isn't actually to convert kn7 styles to psr format, but vice versa. Kn's actually have the ability to create styles from midifiles, within the keyboard itself. Your program may give me back the one feature that I miss ( after selling my pro) and that is the " morphing " feature.

I started on a project years ago, of collecting style phrases ( from my keyboards) that could be made into styles. Problem I had was finding a way to catalogue them , find a suitable playing medium that would allow me to scroll through and audition them, and to actually find duplicate phrases. I ended up putting it into the too hard basket, as the software to do it in those days, didn't exist. Unfortunately I lost most of it when my Atari hard drive died a few years back.

I'm not sure I've understood your statement below correctly. But as far as I know, commercial styles have to be made for each individual brand of keyboards I certainly can't play my roland styles on my kn. Technote created style disks for technics keyboards for years. I would have bought at least 50 plus over a period of 6 to 8 years. I used to buy the occasional roland & korg style too, when I could find one, a few years back.

I beleive there are some style disks around for sale that contain converted styles, but I don't think you can really compare the quality of a converted style to an onboard style in an arranger or to a style that has been professionaly produced for a particular arranger. Converted styles acome from someone else's hard work, the original composer of the style .

It would be great if you could get a midifile that was created to be turned into a style, but I haven't come across them ( maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places haa haa)

best wishes
Rikki

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jos Maas:
[B]Rikki,
About the inavailabillity of good and affordable commercial styles. A lot of the commercial styles are not designed for a particular synth but are plain vanilla GM styles. That way they can be converted and sold for any arranger. Making styles for a particular synth would mean a smaller market an therefor higher prices.

Honestly, theres a surge of creativity that I feel when I sit down at a keyboard that I really dont feel running shareware on Windows XP. I realize that there are certain issues that need to be adressed as far as upgradeabiliy on arrangers and synths, but I dont want to see Yamaha and Roland making the choice to stop producing new arrangers and instead create an ivory computer. It just doesnt work fore me.

Rikki,

To retain the 5 notes in the strum: paste it in a temporary part using the melody option, export the guitar strum track and then import it in the part that you pasted with the chord option.

You noticed that organising a collection of tracks (or phrases as you call them) in the right way is vital. I give each track a name consisting of 3 parts. The first is the instrument name. The second part is the number of beats in a bar and the orginal tempo, if it is in triplets I add a "t". The third part gives some additional info. So the name would be "piano 4-210 C-chord-G-chord" for a typical "hoom-pa-hoom-pa" piano accompaniment. There is going to be a track auditioner in OMB where you can browse thru tracks and play them with a mouse click.

To get midifiles for styles you can record small parts of a style in C and Cmaj7. Of course you have to own the original keyboard or arranger software for this. The styles of about all keyboards have been converted to PSR format. They are in the yamaha-psr-styles forum (and the related Vault). If you don't have a PSR then you can use OMB to produce the midifiles. If you just rename the *.sty to *.mid files you would be able to read them also but you would get very strange sounds.

Sesom,

Maybe you will change your mind after the PC arrangers appear and maybe not. But there are many others that would welcome this device for many different reasons. Getting more for less is one thing, specially where memory and disk space are concerned. Getting a compact device would be an issue for the ones that are hooked up to PC's now. And some don't care for the creativity provided by Roland, Yamaha and Korg. They want to be creative themselves.

Jos

Keyboards like the PSR550, PSR740, PSR2000 have very powerfull synths inside that cannot be accessed from the keybaords o/s, but are accessable from a pc running powerful software. Having that power right in the keyboard should make sound creation easier not harder.
Recording is also easier on a pc then on the keyboard's o/s. The keys would still be under your fingertips.
Starkeeper

Thanks Jos,
going to be interesting to see your next version of OMB.
best wishes
Rikki

Lokesh (another PSR550) owner asked me to test a MIDI file on my PSR550 for him. The file slows down noticeably every once in a while. This does NOT happen in Windows media player. Looks like it is caused by the keyboard reading the disk drive to load more MIDI data. IMO this is a two fold problem:
1) There is insufficient RAM (MIDI files are the smallest muisc files available). File is 120K.
2) The cpu is not powerfull enough to keep playing the MIDI file at tempo and read the disk drive at the same time.
More reasons to go adopt Jos recommendations
Star

Jos,
Do you by any chance know if either Roland VSC or Roland HQ Hypercanvas support such
sysex tuning?
Thanks