Disklavier

My fellow DKV enthusiasts,

As noted by Sam earlier, he and I spent some time trying to connect our DKVs over the internet.  Here's a run-down of our experiences:

1) We first tried to connect using MIDI over the Real Time Protocol (RTPMidi) over the internet.  Built into OSX on the Mac is a Network widget, which implements the protocol.  You can get free software written by Tobias Erichsen which runs on Windows and implements the same protocol at the following address:

http://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/rtpmidi.html

Given that this software is built into the Mac, and free for Windows, it seemed like a good starting point.  Sam and I configured to software, cabled up our computers to the DKVs using MIDI cables, and tried to connect over the internet.

We ran into a snag here, because as some of you may know the routers at our respective homes try to provide a basic level of security by blocking intrusion of some internet traffic.  In our case, the routers rejected to RTPMidi traffic.  For those who wish to pursue this route of connection, it would be necessary to map a couple of ports on your router to be forwarded to the computer running the RPTMidi software, and then you could get this working; details for the basic approach can be found on Tobias' site in the tutorial for his software (requires forwarding two successive ports).  But that's probably beyond what could be expected of many folks, and as Sam was interested in a solution that just about anyone could use, we began to seek an alternative.

As had been pointed out in this group earlier, Zenph sells a software package that provides for connection of Midi devices over the internet, and you can download a Demo version to try it out.  Here's the link:

http://www.zenph.com/im2

 The Demo has full functionality, but is limited to running for 15 mins at a time, and you can only run it 29 times total.  We both downloaded the demo (I got the Mac version, he got the Windows version).  About the only setup we had to do was to enable connections from the internet via a checkbox.  Then I entered his public IP address into a dialog box, hit a 'Connect' button, and voila!  we were able to play each other's Disklavier!  It was a very exciting moment for us both!

There was one potential glitch that we ran across:  It seems that my MX100B was designed so that it *always* does a Midi Thru function, and I couldn't find any way to turn this off.  Sam's later model (I think he has a Mark II) has a setting for enabling Midi Thru.  At any rate, since my MX100B always does Midi Thru, when Sam would send Midi to play my DKV, then the data would be replicated via Midi Thru, and resent back to him.  The result was that, after a slight delay, his piano would also play back the same notes he had sent to my piano.  So this little problem was a bit of a nuisance, but only slightly diminished our enjoyment.  

As it turns out, there are selectable buttons on the Zenph Internet Midi which enable you to disable either the incoming or the outgoing Midi messages, and by temporarily turning off my outgoing Midi messages I was able to make it so that Sam could play my DKV from his without the notes being echoed back to him after a delay.

I think that our little experiment was a lot of fun, and encourage anyone else who is interested to try it out.  Sam is considering whether it would make a useful tool for piano instruction with remote users (would of course work with any Midi keyboard, not just the DKV).  Feel free to direct any questions you may have to either Sam or me.

Cheers!

  Scott Cammack