Disklavier

There is no way that I know of for someone with a non-intel mac to  
purchase downloadable pianosoft titles and make a useable disk out  
them. I'd love to know if someone has figured out how.

...matthew...

On Jun 6, 2007, at 11:52 PM, Mark Fontana wrote:

>
>
> 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
>
>
>
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