Disklavier

On Wed, 6 Jun 2007, Matthew Walworth wrote:

> What is ridiculous is that Yamaha makes the Cadillac of pianos and  
> requires the Volkswagon of computers to interact with it. Joan is  
> absolutely correct that, while arguably necessary, the suggestion  
> will strike any Mac user as ridiculous.


Maybe I'm confused here, but I don't think Yamaha is forcing anyone to
use a PC.  They don't provide much in the way of tools to enhance the
Disklavier from EITHER platform, do they? The existing Windows tools
mentioned on this forum like Root-A-Ripper and dkvutils were written by
fellow Disklavier owners or enthusiasts, and most of them are fairly
old.  The Giebler utilities for Disklavier are SO old (early 1990s) that
the 8 MHz Mac Classic (running System 6 or System 7) was the current
model of Macintosh at the time!

One could obviate the need for a Windows PC by writing (or making it
worth someone's time to write) some Mac software to perform the same
functions as these PC utilities.  I have to believe that formatting DOS
floppies and reading and writing them via low-level disk access must be
possible on a Mac, although you might need to run the app as a
privileged user to do it.  Linux users can access DOS diskettes (even
without mounting them) using a set of command-line utilities called
"mtools" - perhaps this could be ported to the Mac platform, if it
hasn't been already?  This would give Mac users the ability to format
and transfer files to and from Disklavier floppies.  Command line
utilities to convert to and from ESEQ format would be fairly
straightforward to write.  The CD encoding software MID2PianoCD could be
ported fairly readily by someone familiar with Mac GUI programming.

I'm willing to help with this effort, but I don't have a Mac available
for development yet, and it's not my primary day-to-day platform.  But
as Vista appears to be the most obnoxious and bloated version of Windows
yet, I'm giving serious consideration to joining the Mac camp within the
next year or two when Microsoft begins forcing people to upgrade from
XP.  I should probably buy a Mac mini to play with in the meantime...

Mark Fontana