Disklavier

On Fri, 7 Jul 2006, iski1alan wrote:

> Can anyone confirm that Piano Disc CD's or Floppies can be played on a 
> Disklavier MarkIII?

In the past, the Mark III could play most any PianoDisc CD.  But there are
now two formats of PianoDisc CDs, which differ very subtly, and I'm pretty
sure Yamaha still supports only one of them, even though the issue would
be easy to fix in a firmware update.  I don't know of any way to tell
which format the disc uses from the catalog number.  If the disc is in the
unsupported format, you will get a random note here and there but nothing
else.

Also, over the last year, PianoDisc has rolled out a change to their CD
format, called "Silent Drive Plus", which is designed to overlay extra
garbage notes when a disc is played on competitors' systems.  I'm pretty
sure these SDP discs all use the newer format that Yamaha doesn't support.  
Maybe Yamaha will address both issues at the same time (or already has?).

Bottom line-- if you buy older PianoDisc CDs, you should be OK.  If you
buy newer PianoDisc CDs, you could be a victim of the player piano arms
race.

As for PianoDisc floppies, I've never tried one on a Disklavier.  Perhaps
someone else knows...

Mark