Disklavier

Mark,

I think you are right.  USB would be a perfectly reasonable solution, so let's talk about what's wrong with the current implementation, and what Yamaha would have to deal with...

#1) Physically, where are we supposed to place this external drive?  I think it could easily sit in a new mounting bracket under the piano somewhere...even velcro straps would be enough to hold it.  Powering it is another issue...but that has some not-so-clean solutions, I suppose.

#2) Currently, the piano treats the USB as removable storage (which, it really is..).  But what this means is that the internal database throws out all knowledge of what is on that drive every time the piano comes out of standby...and it goes off and scans it again.  This is bad for a few reasons, but I think it would be pretty simple to fix.  One idea that comes to mind is to just stick a unique id in a file on the drive.  When the piano wakes up again, it could just see if that unique id is the same, and assume that nothing has changed in the meantime.  The piano could support the concept of a "refresh" (like it does on the From/To PC share) so that if you DID remove it while the piano was in standby to add more stuff to it via some other PC, you could inform the piano that it was time to scan the disk again.  (Hopefully, this would just verify against the internal database and not lose information for songs which are still there!)  In a perfect world,
 the piano would actually remember a few different external devices that it had seen, but this would require extensive changes to the software, as the schema in the database, and the PRC-100 software currently only knows about the one and only "USB" device...

#3) Piracy.  Of course we would all want this external drive to be able to hold pianosoft songs, songs we download from the radio, etc.  It would be trivial for anyone to put the piano in standby, take their external drive to their PC, and email the songs to their friends.  Currently, the piano uses no encryption what-so-ever for the files that it stores on the harddrive.  It would be pretty simple for yamaha to add that step for external storage.  They would have to look at the protected bit that is stored in the database to know whether or not to do it, since we wouldn't want them to encrypt our own recordings...but, the information is there already, so no big deal.

I think that would do it.  

-Kevin




________________________________
From: Mark Burby <mark.burby@...>
To: disklavier@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 5:53:17 AM
Subject: [disklavier] Re: HDD Upgrade MARK 4


I think athomik makes a good point. I recently puchased a MKIV and am 
far from a professional piano player and using it as a high end 
entertainment system - well at least until my piano skills improve! 
(As a side note, it gets about 8 hours continuous play each day and 
offering outstanding return on investment if you measure it in terms 
of hours played /$ spent)

To me, upgrading the HDD is a drastic option, even if it is 
technically feasible. Someone earlier indicated that plugging a 
storage device via say USB would not be possible for playback. At 
first glance, there seems to be no obvious reason why this should not 
be possible and is likely to be a software/firmware constraint.

As we see technology moving into an era where the HDD as we know it 
will be superceded by solid state memory devices - at least until 
network speeds increase reliably to enable remote storage elsewhere on 
a network or internet - USB-accessed storage media seems to be the 
least invasive, cheapest and most flexible option for Yamaha to 
develop.

    

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