Patches and discussion for Ensoniq VFX family

--- In Ensoniq-VFX-SD@egroups.com, keith cummings 
<keithkcummings@y...> wrote:
> Hi guys, for all you in the warmer climates, I just
> thought you'd like to know it's snowing again here
> north of 49 and you don't know what you're missing.
> Speaking of floppy problems, I just received a bunch
> by mail from a gent in the USA and all I get is the
> file names and then data error on my synth display. I
> suspect they use some heavy duty Xray machines at
> Customs, would this wipe out data, and if so any
> advice for shipping floppies across the boarder. Also,
> can DD drives read HD floppies with SMF files? Cheers
> all, Keith

A little late on a reply, but...

Modern X-ray machines at airports and customs are VERY low power, the 
days when X-raying floppies and photographic film were fatal to the 
media involved are quite long gone... 

However, what likely happened is that the disks were getting old, or 
the actual magnetic media was getting old, in which case, even the 
tiniest magnetic field can destroy the data. The best solution is to 
copy the contents onto a brand new disk before you ship it, if you 
must ship it via a method that gets X-rayed. 

Sometimes marking 'Magnetic Media - DO NOT XRAY' on the packaging 
will be honored, but not always - and it has a chance of a negative 
result, where the customs people suddenly see something 'suspicious' 
in you not wanting them to X-ray it (a good tip here is to ship disks 
seperate from anything else, in 'proper' disk envelopes - customs 
will be less suspicious of a small package that couldn't be hiding 
much more than the floppy disk that is claimed to be in it)

As for HD disks, as long as the HD disk was formatted as DD, it can 
be read fine, a DD drive will not (and cannot) read a HD formatted 
disk. On the other hand, the VFX series cannot read SMF directly, you 
will need to use a utility to convert SMF to Ensoniq's sequencer 
format.