Disklavier

On Sat, 2010-05-01 at 15:30 +0000, rwberry99 wrote:

> The feature I'm *really* looking for is the ability to rip CDs for use
> with the Smart PianoSoft titles I have (so can enjoy them without
> having the audio CD in the CD drive.) 

Some people have reported success using MID2PianoCD to merge PianoSmart
tracks:

   http://dp70.dyndns.org/mid2pianocd/

The basic idea is to rip each audio CD track to a WAV file using a
program like Exact Audio Copy, then locate the corresponding MIDI file
from the PianoSmart floppy.  Rename both files so that they have the
same filenames and just different extensions:

   track1.wav
   track1.mid

Put the files in the same folder, import the MIDI file into MID2PianoCD,
set the source velocity profile to Disklavier (under Advanced), then
encode to a Disklavier format WAV file.  This essentially combines the
two files into a PianoSoft Plus Audio track.  Then compress that WAV
file with the Apple Lossless codec for use with iTunes, or with the FLAC
codec if on Windows.

If the sync of the resulting track isn't quite right, you might need to
adjust it by decoupling the left and right stereo channels and sliding
the channel carrying the CD audio earlier or later in time relative to
the channel carrying the Disklavier signal.

I'd like to have MID2PianoCD ensure proper sync automatically, but to do
that, I would need to fully understand all of the proprietary SYSEX
messages embedded in the accompaniment MIDI tracks.  As far as I know,
these are not documented anywhere and have not been reverse-engineered
by anyone.

Mark Fontana