I've heard about this being done before with various Roland and Korg gear, where they'd take out the floppy drive and add a newer media type 3.5" drive.

As an example, I remember when Roland S760 Sampler owners would "mod" their unit by taking out the floppy and replacing it with a Zip Drive.

With all of the 3.5" drive options on the market today, do you think it'd be possible (and it should be) to remove the floppy drives from our keyboards and use Smart Media, SD or Zip Drives.

I have an XP60 which I've owned since 2000. Even though I'm using Pro-Tools and Cubase for audio, I still use (and don't laugh) my XP60's sequencer because I've just gotten so comfortable with it. I know eventually (maybe after 10 years or so), the floppy might fail.

Wouldn't it be neat to take advantage of the higher capacity of these drives? Imagine, a 1GB SD card for your Korg M1.

Any thoughts?

This discussion comes up every so often at the Arranger Forum. The usual answer is "can't be done." The major reason lies in the keyboard's operating system and the fact that you cannot add driver software to the OS. If someone could invent something that you could insert into a floppy drive that would read a smart card or USB, that would be great, but "it ain't gonna happen."

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Cass Pawlowski - Detroit
www.cassponline.com/

it goes much, much, deeper than jamming a different drive in a slot. The roland s-760 had scsi, so adding a zip wasn't a mod, so much as it was the obvious thing to do.

Start buying xp-60 floppy drives now.