Disklavier

Answering my own question, but I suppose the information should be here just in case anyone ever searches and finds this...

It works just fine.  Connected the computer to the piano and it detected it fine.  It wanted drivers.  RTMF.  It says so right in the Disklavier manual.  They are available on yamaha's site, and work perfectly.

In my case, it didn't help the latency at all, but I'm fairly certain it's due to ancient hardware otherwise.  The new computer (and slick soundcard) should be here in about a week, so I'll just have to use the piano's voices for now. :-)

-Kevin



----- Original Message ----
From: Kevin Goroway <kgoroway@...>
To: disklavier@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 1:03:31 PM
Subject: Re: [disklavier] MarkIV MIDI via USB?


Okay, but the question still remains...Does it work?  Do you need drivers on the pc to see the disklavier as a MIDI device?

Also, although there's TONS more bandwidth available to USB, the question remains unanswered as to the latency to get through the USB stack on the PC...modern audio cards have latencies in the 2 ms range....can USB compete?  I dunno.

Anyway, the point is somewhat moot (although I'm still interested in the answer) since I went and ordered an e-mu 0404 card for the new computer.

Thanks.
-Kevin



----- Original Message ----
From: Mark Fontana <mfontana@frontierne t.net>
To: disklavier@yahoogro ups.com
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 12:06:07 PM
Subject: Re: [disklavier] MarkIV MIDI via USB?




While the TO HOST cable is a tried-and-true solution, connecting to a
Mark IV via USB should offer considerably lower latency and improved
timing accuracy.

This is due, in part, to the bandwidth available:

MIDI wireline connection: 31250 bits per second
Serial TO HOST connection: 38400 bits per second
USB 1.1 connection: 12,000,000 bits per second
USB 2.0 connection: 480,000,000 bits per second

Even with the slight protocol overhead of USB, the volume of data
transmitted is about the same, so the benefit of the extra bandwidth is
huge.  I have not seen any USB MIDI interfaces that actually connect at
USB 2.0 high-speed rates, though.  Most support only USB 1.1, probably
for backwards compatibility with older computers.  USB 1.1's bandwidth
is still enormous for this application.

Mark Fontana

On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, JORGE FERNANDEZ wrote:

> it seems to me that the best aproach would be an standard rs-232
> serial port and cable connected "TO host" port in the DKV (I assume
> this one extists in the DKV mark IV)
> 
> This serial connection worked fine for me many years...