Disklavier

On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Fred Dismuke wrote:

> Mark, you wrote of Pianodisc compatibility in your response; I have a
> DCD1 and was wondering if there was a way of saving general midi files
> to CDs for playback on the DCD1 without always involving my computer
> connection. I've tried saving a few *.mid files to a CD and it doesn't
> seem to work. Is it more complicated than that? If so, where can I
> find the particulars on that? I've read in this forum of converting to
> .wav files is this necessary?


The problem is that the DCD-1 cannot read data files from CDs... it can
only play audio CDs in which the tracks contain "analog MIDI" - basically
a special audio signal (like a fax machine tone) that the piano can turn
back into a MIDI stream.

I wrote a little Windows utility to convert MIDI files into WAV files that
are encoded in the necessary format.  You can download it here:

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

It's basically a two-step process- use MID2PianoCD to batch-convert your 
MIDI files to WAV files, then create an audio CD from those WAV files 
using your favorite CD burning software (I use NERO).

You'll only be able to record about 74 minutes of MIDI files per CD, since
you're using the CD for "audio" instead of data files.  It's horrendously
inefficient...

On the Internet, you may find other software programs that convert MIDI to
WAV format, but they are designed to produce a WAV file that a human can
listen to, not a control signal for your Disklavier.

Mark