Disklavier

Dear Kevin,
Sounds like a great idea! But I have a Mark II XG...any hope for me?
Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: disklavier@yahoogroups.com [mailto:disklavier@yahoogroups.com] On
Behalf Of Kevin Goroway
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 4:52 PM
To: disklavier@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [disklavier] DKVBrowser new feature desirability?





I have recently been using the ABRepeat function of my piano quite a bit
lately to try to learn some passages that my uncle has recorded for me.
I've found the remote to be rather cumbersome while doing this since you
have to keep taking your hands off of the keys to find the little
buttons on the remote.  So, I went ahead and added full support for
ABRepeat and Tempo in a recent release of DKVBrowser thinking that I
could imporve upon the PRC remote.  When all was done and I tried to use
it I found that it was no better (and maybe worse) since now I had to go
find the mouse, and THEN find the little buttons on the screen.  Sure, I
could present more information on the screen at once (locations of the A
& B, and have the song slider on the same screen so you don't have to
use the back arrow twice on the remote, etc...) but the actual usability
wasn't any better (though I do plan to add features that allow you to
automatically set the A location to the current B location so you can
start working on the next passage).

Then I realized that I was sitting in front of a big device that had
lots of keys on it already...What if I could assign some of them to have
different functions?  I then set off and taught DKVBrowser how to listen
to MIDI events (which turned out to be trivial).  I now have a version
which allows me to use the leftmost pedal to automatically jump back to
the "A" position, and the middle pedal to toggle between Play and Pause.
It makes using ABRepeat an absolute joy (after setting the A and B
point, and the tempo via the screen, or PRC).

So here's the question.  Does anyone see a use for this?  It would
require a computer that is on the same network as the piano (DKVBrowser
standard config, wired or wireless), and also connected via MIDI at the
same time (a simple USB cable works perfectly, after downloading the
drivers from Yamaha's site).  The problem is that I have it hacked into
my version without any customization.  In order to do it right I would
need to add a feature to allow users to specify the MIDI input, and then
allow the user to assign any midi event (pedals, keys, etc.) to any
action.  There are shortcuts I could take in the interim...like leaving
the current pedals hardcoded, but allow the user (by necessity) to
specify the MIDI input.  Either way, it's a real amount of work, and I'm
happy to do it....as long as someone out there might actually use it!

Thoughts?

Thanks.
-Kevin