Disklavier

Good morning, everyone.

On Dec 27, 2008, at 12:12 AM, Mark wrote:

> Carol or anybody,
>
> Is there a difference is using the MIDI ports versus the Serial port  
> on
> a Mark II XG? I have been considering trying to use a PC or such to
> allow the CD with all of its functions. It would appear to me that the
> MIDI ports would just allow the MIDI information where the serial port
> would allow other information. Or would the serial port be to slow to
> access the audio/vocal information.
>

In my experience, MIDI seems to function the same using the serial  
port as it does using the MIDI ports. In fact, the Yamaha website  
states, "there is no differencebetween the quality of the MIDI signal  
via the TO HOST port and the MIDI IN/OUT ports."

The big difference is that using the MIDI ports requires a MIDI  
interface and using the serial port requires a computer that has a  
serial port as well as the appropriate driver to make the serial port  
work.

Getting the serial port to work on a modern Mac which natively does  
not have serial ports is next to impossible (with one exception that  
I'll mention in a moment). Pre-OS X Macintoshes do have serial ports,  
but configuring and using OMS or FreeMIDI as the necessary MIDI driver  
is a pain. However, unlike modern OS X Macs, you can actually get  
iTunes to output MIDI data to the serial port under OS 9 using OMS or  
FreeMIDI. This means that you can use iTunes as your librarian  
program. The reason is that QuickTime in OS 9 enables you to select  
OMS or FreeMIDI as the output for QuickTime MIDI data.

Using the serial port with a Windows computer requires a computer that  
has a serial port, of course. And, you need to install the Yamaha CBX  
serial driver which you can get here:

http://www.global.yamaha.com/download/cbx_midi/index.html

Apparently this CBX driver supports Windows 95 through XP.

You can use the serial port with any modern Macintosh or Windows  
computer if you use a Yamaha MIDI interface that also has a serial  
port, such as the UX-96. Sometimes I do this so that I can have two  
different computers plugged into my Disklavier, one using he serial  
port and one using the MIDI ports. All I have to do is to move the To  
Host switch on the back of the control unit to the correct position in  
order to switch the active input.

NOTE: Using the serial port does not provide any additional  
communication between the computer and the control unit other than  
MIDI data. The Disklavier Pro 2000 (of which there were fewer than 10  
manufactured) did have a special version of the firmware for the  
control unit that enabled additional communication using the serial  
port and a special software program running in Windows 98. However,  
that is not available for other models.

Regards,
PianoBench