Disklavier

I'm pretty new to this Disklavier thing and have benefited from all the great advice from this group. I don't know if this is any help for this subject: I used a MIDI to USB cable to connect my DL to a Windows XP professional laptop.Using Van Basco's free software, all I had to do was to connect the cables and play the song in Van Basco. 
 
One important note was that the MIDI IN of the cable had to be inserted in the MIDI OUT of the Piano and so on. The cable was $10 on Ebay and all the software was loaded onto it. A lot easier than the TO HOST cable and any other serial port connections if you asked me. Here is a link 
 http://cgi.ebay.com/3M-Keyboard-to-PC-USB-MIDI-Interface-Adapter-Cable-K97_W0QQitemZ280268785894QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item280268785894&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=72%3A1234%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C39%3A1%7C240%3A1308%7C301%3A1%7C293%3A1%7C294%3A50

--- On Sat, 12/27/08, George F. Litterst <PianoBench@...m> wrote:


From: George F. Litterst <PianoBench@...>
Subject: Re: [disklavier] MIDI or Serial port to computer
To: disklavier@yahoogroups.com
Date: Saturday, December 27, 2008, 10:03 AM






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