Disklavier

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Carol Beigel wrote:

> Hopefully someone with more knowlege than myself will tell you a solution.
> My understanding of MIDI and Disklaviers is that MIDI files that come over
> the internet, or appear on floppy disks can be manipulated or edited in
> sequencer software, but MIDI on a CD (which is audio) needs to run through
> an analog converter.  Although your piano can play MIDI from a CD, because
> somewhere in that chain is a little black box like a MIDIman or a Yamaha CD
> player with a converter already built-in, I do not know of a way to pull the
> MIDI information off a CD.
>
> I, too, would like to know how to separate or extract the MIDI data from the
> audio on a CD; and how to make my own CDs that have both audio and MIDI.

A while ago a member of the list posted a message about creating PianoDisc
CD's which have the same effect as the yamaha ones. He wrote some software
to create the special audio needed. I had a play around, and it works
pretty damned well.

However, as far as I know Yamaha haven't made the specification of their
format available, presumably because they want to keep the monopoly on
Pianosoft titles. It shouldn't be too hard to decipher though - one
could capture the midi output from a DCD1 into a midi recorder, and then
analyse the original audio signal. I doubt it's a very complicated
encoding, but it's a little beyond me.

This doesn't help with the original query of how to extract the data,
but I've attached Mark's message for reference.

Regards,
James


-----

Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2003 17:45:49 -0500 (CDT)
From: Mark A. Fontana <mfontana@...>
Reply-To: disklavier@yahoogroups.com
To: disklavier@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [disklavier] Re: difference in CD and floppy drives

On Mon, 2 Jun 2003 PianoBench@... wrote:

> Currently, Yamaha's CD feature in the Mark III and the DCD1 plays three
> formats of MIDI encoded as audio: PianoSoft Plus Audio (Yamaha), QRS (or
Baldwin
> Concertmaster - same format), and PianoDisc. The Yamaha CD units also
play
> normal Audio CDs. They do not read MIDI files or data CD-ROMs of any
kind.


A few weeks ago, I posted a link to a software utility I've written
which converts MIDI and ESEQ files into WAV files with PianoDisc-style
encoding.  The idea is that you burn the WAV files onto a CD-R using the
CD authoring tool of your choice, then the resulting CD should play on
the piano.

If the Mark III pianos are able to play PianoDisc CDs, it should be
possible for Disklavier owners to make their own CDs using this tool
(just make sure you select PianoDisc format).

Here's the link to the software again:

   http://dp70.dyndns.org/mid2pianocd/

If anyone tries this, please report back to the group on whether it was
successful or not.

If this works, it should be possible to make homemade piano+audio CDs
for the Disklavier using this approach, in conjunction with a decent
audio editor like CoolEdit.


Mark