Casio CZ/ VZ/ FZ - Pro Series

I had a bunch of CZ patches stored on a C-64, and needed to move them to my Win XP machine. The C-64 program, CZPL, was simple, elegant, and performed bulk data transfers easily. Every Windows app I tried on Win XP, not so much. See if any of this helps you in your quest.

First, sllloooow doooowwnn. The Casio chokes when it receives commands at WinXP speeds. So, you need to give the CZ a little slack from your PC. Install a CPU slowdown app (CPUKiller worked for me), set things slow, and do transfers then. MIDI-OX allows you to configure rates--don't recall the numbers offhand.

MIDI-OX: There's a way of pulling down one patch at a time. It's slow and a nuisance, but at least it works. Here's the link for a tutorial:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/czseries/message/1025

(You'll need to join czseries group to view this. If you can't or won't, let me know and I'll FWD or cross-post the message here.)

SendSX: I could send sysex patches to the CZ with no trouble using SendSX. I didn't experiment with receiving...my guess is the MIDI-OX tutorial can be adapted.

SoundLib: This was the most frustrating app, because it worked beautifully on Win98, and did bulk dumps of the internal bank. On WinXP, it would work pretty much when it felt like it. I eventually got it working once in a while. You may be able to get SoundLib working by doing the following:

a) Register SoundLib (get that code from the download website!)
b) Install a CPU slowdown app (I used CPUKiller)
c) Make your WinXP machine think it's a Win98 machine (set compatibility levels low (Win95 or Win98))
d) Be prepared to get one bank intact at a time, turning off and on the CZ, and perhaps restarting Windows after each download.

Hope this helps.