Disklavier

On Tue, 3 Oct 2006, Aaron Zornes wrote:

> It is maddeningly difficult (some say impossible for mere mortals) to copy
> tens, hundreds, or thousands of MIDIs onto CD-ROM for use onto Disklavier.
> 
> Has any one cracked the secret yet to making Mark II, II or IV series read
> standard CD-ROMS as file directories as the system does standard floppies?


There is no secret to figure out; this feature is simply not present in
the Disklavier's firmware (at least not in the Mark II and III models).

It would be extremely difficult for a third party to implement support for
reading data CDs without Yamaha's source code and development environment.  
And even then, I doubt anyone would be willing to PAY a third party to
develop this enhancement, so it would be a labor of love.  Our best bet is
to continue to express interest in this feature to Yamaha.

Without iPod-style hierarchical navigation, I personally think this
feature would be of limited use once the number of tracks on the disc
grows larger than a few dozen.

Perhaps a better solution would be to hack an MP3 player to support
playback of MIDI files, converting them on the fly to "analog MIDI" output
through the headphone jack.  That would solve the large library navigation
problem, plus you could also store MP3 files of Pianosoft Plus Audio CDs
in the same playlist.

Mark Fontana