Converting Disklavier CD (Mark III system) to USB for Enspire ST

[smer...@gmail.com]

Hello,

I had an older Mark III Disklavier (floppy and CD player).  I recently upgraded the piano that now has the ENSPIRE ST Disklavier that contains a USB.  Is there a way to copy the CD to the USB and have it play on the new Disklavier.  I thought I could just rip the CD and copy to the USB but I just get buzzing and hissing when I play it on the new piano.  Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Scott

[Ralph Specht]

What are the file formats for the songs on the CD?

On Oct 10, 2020, at 5:02 PM, smer...@gmail.com <smer...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I had an older Mark III Disklavier (floppy and CD player).  I recently upgraded the piano that now has the ENSPIRE ST Disklavier that contains a USB.  Is there a way to copy the CD to the USB and have it play on the new Disklavier.  I thought I could just rip the CD and copy to the USB but I just get buzzing and hissing when I play it on the new piano.  Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Scott

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[Scott E]

Hi Ralph,

That is a fair question and I'm not sure how to determine that.  When I open the CD it appears to be in the format of a typical audio CD where all the tracks are labeled .cda, which I understand is a file that points to the actual audio track.

Thanks,

Scott

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[Ralph Specht]

Suggest you might check with your dealer or Yamaha tech support. 

I previously had an MX100 and purchased an Enspire upright. 

With the help of some of the Disklavier User Group tools (try carol beigels) website I was able to convert each floppy from Eseq format to midi. 

Also, I would try googling. 

Sorry I couldn’t be much help but will try to find a solution. 

Ralph

On Oct 10, 2020, at 6:23 PM, Scott E <smer...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Mark Fontana]

Enspire doesn't support playing the older Pianosoft Plus Audio CD tracks from a USB drive; it apparently doesn't know how to decode them.  This could be because previous Disklavier models used a DSP (digital signal processing) ASIC to recover the MIDI stream from the CD tracks, but Enspire uses newer/different hardware, so a new implementation would be required.  It shouldn't be that difficult to add this decoding capability in software, but since the format is over 20 years old, maybe the engineers most familiar with its technical details don't work at Yamaha anymore.

Yamaha is aware of the ongoing problems faced by people with older music libraries who have upgraded to Enspire.  It would be possible to develop software to convert ripped Pianosoft Plus Audio CD tracks to the newer Pianosoft Audio format that Enspire uses (in which the MIDI file and accompaniment audio file are already separated).  But the results would be better if Yamaha would dig up the original MIDI and audio files (from which the CDs were encoded) instead of extracting MIDI streams from the CD tracks.  For a while, Yamaha seemed interested in having me develop a conversion tool for this material, but they've apparently lost interest.  Maybe that means they're making progress on their own solution.

Yamaha really ought to convert all the Pianosoft Plus Audio material to Pianosoft Audio format (there aren't THAT many albums) and then let Enspire owners download updated versions of albums from the cloud after proving ownership of them via a mail-in exchange program, photo upload within the Enspire Controller app, or something like that.  That would be much better than requiring individual Enspire owners and dealers to (redundantly) convert the material themselves.

Mark Fontana

[Mark Fontana]

Pianosoft Plus Audio CDs are standard "Red Book" audio CDs, not data CDs, so they don't actually contain any files.  The ".cda" file listings seen in Windows are just a "helpful" abstraction of the CD contents; most people find this more confusing than useful.  To extract CD audio to WAV/FLAC/MP3 files, you can use a program like Exact Audio Copy.

[Larry Brown]

Or, much better, just force people to buy more CDs, and repeat that over and over as new technology is introduced. That would be the expected business model.

From Yamaha's point of view, dedicating resources to write and publish software requires substantial investment. One programmer costs more than $100,000, and they'd need ten or twenty. So then what's the return on investment? Writing software to allow people to convert CDs they already own has a return of "zero" or worse. Or you think they will invest money converting those CDs themselves and then just send them out for free because you paid them $19.99 ten years ago? Doesn't seem likely.

But besides that, let's say Yamaha wanted to "do the right thing" (and go broke in the process). Any publisher of CDs like that has to navigate a myriad of copyright laws and royalty payments, and anti-piracy legislation. Publishing items on the cloud for download or writing software that rips and converts....highly problematic for them. 

My opinion is that any solution would have to come from the user base and would likely have to navigate sophisticated anti-piracy tech.

Larry Brown

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[Spencer Chase]

I am willing to bet that Mark would be very happy to write the necessary software for $100,000 Mark is really smart and knows the details of all player encoding methods. It would only take one Mark although it might take ten ordinary programmers. 

 

 

Best regards, Spencer Chase
67550 Bell Springs Rd.
Garberville, CA 95542 Postal service only.
Laytonville, CA 95454 UPS only.
Spe...@spencerserolls.com
Spe...@poodlex.com
Spe...@mcn.org
http://www.spencerserolls.com
http://www.poodlex.com
(425) 791-0309

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[Ian]

Larry, 

PIANODISC have 'done the right thing' over the last decade, in providing GRATIS, upgraded library material to owners – without going broke. 

Ian Williamson

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[Scott E]

I appreciate all the information.  In the interim I found an old CD player and plugged it into the OMNI input on the ENSPIRE and I am able to get it to play correctly (Audio with the Keys playing).  I tried to see if I could then Record this with the ENSPIRE app.  It recorded just the Audio but no MIDI so the Keys do not play.  I might have done something wrong and may play with that a little more.

Mark,

I see that you wrote MID2PianoCD.  I have not tried it yet.  I do have a handful of 3.5" disks as well.  Will MID2PianoCD allow me to copy those floppy disks and put on a USB stick, or am I in the same situation as the CD issue?

Kind Regards,

Scott

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[Mark Fontana]

Interesting find - so Enspire can apparently play Pianosoft Plus Audio format but only through the external analog inputs, not from a USB drive.  Seems like something Yamaha ought to be able to fix unless the PPA format is being decoded in hardware and there's no software path to it.

Regarding MID2PianoCD: it's not the right tool for this job.  To convert Disklavier and PianoDisc floppies to files you can place on a USB stick for Enspire, use PPFBU:  http://www.kinura.net/ppfbu/

[Ralph Specht]

I have recently downloaded the John Denver album from Yamaha for my Enspire. I believe this album was available as a floppy accompaniment to the music CD commercial product for Disklavier units equipped with both a floppy and a CD player. 

The download consists of a pair of files for each song on the album and are stored on the USB thumb drive for playing. 

-  File 1 is a midi file which contains the piano accompaniment track. 

-  File 2 is an MP3 file which contains the vocal and instrumental track. I believe that MP3 format is a compression of the WAV file which was on the original commercial CD. 

Both file names are the same. 

Does anyone understand how the Enspire reads both files simultaneously and sync them?

Regards

Ralph

On Oct 14, 2020, at 5:06 PM, Scott E <smer...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[smer...@gmail.com]

Mark,

Thanks for the pointer to  PPFBU:  http://www.kinura.net/ppfbu/ .  I'll give it a try once I make it past the current obstacle which is using a USB 3.5 floppy drive with newer window's machines.  I get an error that says the drive needs to be formatted.  I did some research on that and it seems newer window's operating systems may not be able to read some of the older floppies.  Trying to track down an older window's box.  Dang, I was hoping this would be easier. :)

-Scott

[Ralph Specht]

You might look into purchasing some 720kb floppies which are pre-formatted. Looks like there are some on EBay. Or, maybe a local computer shop will have some. 

On Oct 14, 2020, at 9:13 PM, smer...@gmail.com <smer...@gmail.com> wrote:

Mark,

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[Eric Sickinger]

Marks PPFBU works perfectly to extract the midi or .fil files from the floppy.

The yamaha floppies are intentionally wrote without the first sector to prevent

copying the floppies. Windows will always try to format the floppy. DO NOT

format or you will lose your files.

I used the program to copy all my floppies to a SD card for my SD Card floppy

emulator. Works Perfect. I am glad he updated the program. Initially  would not

work if used with USB bus controlled floppy drives. Thanks Mark!

Eric

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[Mark Fontana]

It's normal that Windows can't read Yamaha and PianoDisc floppies without special software like PPFBU; Disklavier diskettes contain an invalid boot sector to prevent casual copying, and PianoDisc diskettes use a proprietary filesystem that Windows doesn't support.  This is why PPFBU exists.  So try your USB floppy drive anyway, using PPFBU, and see if it works.  The latest version of Windows 10 still supports USB floppy drives just fine.  There is some misleading and out-of-date information on the web, and maybe there were some intermediate versions of Windows where things were broken.

Some USB floppy drives work with PPFBU and some don't.  It isn't a Windows driver issue but rather something to do with the particular USB floppy controller in the drive.  Most of the USB floppy drives on the market today are shoddy Chinese products and priced accordingly.  If you can find an older one on eBay, one made as a laptop accessory from the era when people still used floppy drives for real work (circa 1998-2005), you will often have better luck.  Drives marked TEAC FD-05PUB work well, in my experience- there are many drives with these mechanisms, rebranded as IBM, Dell, etc.

For better results with PPFBU, use an older computer that has a decent brand of floppy drive (e.g. TEAC) connected to the motherboard by ribbon cable.  And for the absolute best results with very old Disklavier diskettes (1980s-early 1990s), get a genuine 720 KB floppy drive (not a 1.44 MB drive) and connect it to a motherboard that supports it.  Such drives are getting harder to find these days.  I have an old HP Pavilion a1312n desktop computer from about 2005 that's old enough to support 720 KB floppy drives (connected to the motherboard) and new enough to run Windows 7 - a good combination.  I drag that computer out whenever I can't read a disk using the more convenient USB floppy drive, and it usually saves the day.

Mark Fontana

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[Mark Fontana]

I don't understand the question.  Seems like all that matters is that for Pianosoft Audio format, Enspire *does* read both files in the pair (MIDI file + accompaniment audio file) and plays them in sync.  Neither file requires any temporal offset relative to the other, and from the user's perspective, the piano simply starts playback at 00:00:00 for both simultaneously and advances in time at the same rate.  Internally, the Disklavier does process the MIDI track slightly ahead of the audio track so that the solenoids can be activated in time for note strikes to finish in sync with the audio.

[Ralph Specht]

Thanks. You answered my question on how the Disklavier handles both files. 

On Oct 15, 2020, at 5:06 AM, Mark Fontana <ma...@kinura.net> wrote:



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[Scott E]

Mark,

You are a rock star.  I downloaded PPFBU and it works perfectly.  I was able to make a copy of the floppy and saved the files to MIDI, copy those to my USB drive for the ENSPIRE, and it played the piano just fine.  Thanks for your efforts in programs like this.  It appears that the ENSPIRE does not understand the .fil (I believe that to be the ESEQ format) ... at least through the USB, but the .mid works great.

Thanks for the help,

Scott

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[George Frederick Litterst]

A rock star is he!

PianoBench

[Spencer Chase]

Mark is a programming genius, not sure of how stable he is :)

He is quite modest but will not reject monetary contributions for his efforts. I believe there is a link for this on his site.

 

 

Best regards, Spencer Chase
67550 Bell Springs Rd.
Garberville, CA 95542 Postal service only.
Laytonville, CA 95454 UPS only.
Spe...@spencerserolls.com
Spe...@poodlex.com
Spe...@mcn.org
http://www.spencerserolls.com
http://www.poodlex.com
(425) 791-0309

(707) 223-8212

------ Original Message ------

From: "George Frederick Litterst" <piano...@gmail.com>

To: disklavier-s...@googlegroups.com

Sent: 10/18/2020 7:54:41 AM

Subject: Re: Converting Disklavier CD (Mark III system) to USB for Enspire ST

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[Mark Fontana]

Thanks for the kind words!  But the praise really goes to the entire handful of us who've developed software and provided support for the Disklavier on various forums over the years (including Kevin Goroway, George Litterst, Spencer Chase, Anthony Robinson, David Contois and others), in many ways filling in for the prompt response and software utilities one might expect to come from Yamaha itself.  Back in the 1990s, Yamaha occasionally participated in the former DUG (Disklavier Users' Group) mailing list that they hosted, but over the past two decades, it's been mostly a user-to-user effort on all fronts. 

It's crazy that four years after Enspire began shipping in Q3 of 2016, there's still no official solution for these upgrade / content migration issues, and users are still working out solutions and compatibility by experimentation.  One would think that people who buy more than one Disklavier over the years (resulting in this need) would be the company's star customers.

Regarding my stability... it will improve once we all make it through the current pandemic and political chaos.

Mark

On 10/18/20 9:56 PM, Spencer Chase wrote:

Mark is a programming genius, not sure of how stable he is :)

------ Original Message ------

From: "George Frederick Litterst" <piano...@gmail.com>

To: disklavier-s...@googlegroups.com

Sent: 10/18/2020 7:54:41 AM

Subject: Re: Converting Disklavier CD (Mark III system) to USB for Enspire ST

A rock star is he!

PianoBench

On Oct 18, 2020, at 10:47 AM, Scott E <smer...@gmail.com> wrote:

Mark,

You are a rock star.  I downloaded PPFBU and it works perfectly.  . . .

[Ralph Specht]

Another Enspire quirk is that the unit displays the folders (I use one folder per album/diskette) in the order they were saved on the USB drive, not in alphabetical order. 

In the past, I have used a shareware program called FATSorter to sort the folders in alphabetical order. 

This program has stopped working in the latest versions of Windows 10. 

Also, there is an undocumented limit of 5000 files on the thumb drive. 

Ralph

On Oct 20, 2020, at 5:29 AM, Mark Fontana <ma...@kinura.net> wrote:



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