Disklavier

On Fri, 11 Apr 2003, Carol Beigel wrote:
> This is all too new for me to be sure how all this works.  I think, though,
> that the PianoSmart uses MTC, MIDI Time Code.  You can probably do this with
> Cakewalk Sonar.  I think you would make the MIDI recording for the piano
> part just like you would do in the piano.  Put both the CD you want to
> record with in the CD player of your computer, and record in real time using
> a MIDI keyboard.  There must be "something" on the CD that give a time code.
>   Otherwise, maybe it is just timing.  Perhaps the MIDI recording is just
> that - at a very specific certain time, it starts playing/recording.  You
> could probably sync to a wave file.

Hi Carol,

MTC is basically just SMPTE for MIDI - ie its a simple time protocol and
is based on "normal" time, ie hours minutes seconds frames, and the
messages are very similar. Since a CD plays back at a constant bit rate
its quite easy to calculate the times. Apparently on an audio CD there are
75 frames of audio per second, and it is supposedly trivial to synchronise
the two together, but how easy this is for a disklavier I don't know until
I get one. In the case of playback the CD player would be the MTC master
source, and the disklavier would play the data back coordinated with that.

> I know that on the DKV, you put the CD you want to play/record with into the
> CD player, and a floppy disk into the drive and then just hit Record.  It
> works because I have done it with the sample CDs that come with DKVs.
> This probably is not much help, but it is all I know.

MTC is sent as system exclusive midi messages, so it should be really easy
to create something in Sonar or similar and just copy it over to a floppy
and get it to work, but I have no way of knowing for sure, unless someone
could play along to a commercial CD that I also own and send me the file
the disklavier made. If you have a computer near the disklavier you can
always play them back using the computer - not as convenient however.

Regards,

James