Frank,
Your educating the store you went to has been a major issue with customers and manufactures over the past several years, especially this past year with a few chain's opening up more and more stores here in the US.
More and more I hear from Players, hobbiests and Manufactures that the "big box store" mentality can be the biggest problem our industry is facing. More and more, large chains open up new stores. Not always has this been shown to be a wise decision. Not all newly opened store around the country are doing very well according to industry professionals. At times I think this has become a war of the "Giants" to see who can become the "king of the mountain". Many times, finding quality sales people can be a real problem. I have found this in most every kind of business I walk into lately.. I have fewer choices in Grocery Stores, and fewer Banks to choose from. I used to have many small camera stores to go into where I could walk outside and try out a new lens or talk to the guy behind the counter about what is the right lens for me, etc. The small corner hardware store is almost gone here in Los Angeles, and when I have to go to the giant electronic stores I either get no help or poor help because the saleperson just doesn't know what he or she is selling. This is not the way it is in every store, but I think many of you have experienced the same treatment as I have. I sense from the customers that walk into my store, that most those interested in arranger keyboards especially, still want a store where questions can be asked and answered and the ability to demo a product well and features explained is still a much in demand comodity. It is interesting to know that when a young teenager comes in with a couple of friends to see electric guitars and amps and after they have removed a couple of guitars and I ask if I can be of any assistance, they get mad because I don't want the guitars I am going to sell to be scratched or banged by their not being carful, their response is "let's go to the "chain" store where we can do anything we want". My response to these young customers is "take a look at the instruments you are buying at those stores" and look at how badly damaged many of their products are and how very few have been set up and adjusted, and that this is why I want to be so careful with my guitars so you can buy a really nice one when you are ready". The big stores just don't work this way. Maybe it's good and maybe it's not, but this is the only way I know how to do business and it is the only way I would want to do business. I know many of you say the small guy can't compete in prices compared to the .com company's and mail order, but in many cases, prices have become very similar if you buy from a smaller store, and many times the service far outways a small difference in cost. I can only speak from my heart and what I see as a growing problem in the music industry. We are still an industry of highly technical products that usually require a great deal of education and support. Well........ enough lecturing.
Now, getting to your question regarding the transfer of midi files. You have a couple of different choices for copying your midi files from the Roland keyboard.
First, the easiest, if you buy the 9000 pro would be to go into the disk utility of the em2000 which allows copying from one zip id # to a destination zip id#. I haven't tried this direct to the 9000pro but I do this all the time with an external SCSSI disk drive in my store. I first select all songs to copy and then execute the transfer which works great. The long way to do this would be to select about 25 songs at a time and copy them to a floppy disk which you would then copy to the 9000 or SD-1. The solton SD-1 does not have a SCSSI option so I just copy my disk to the hard drive. this is quite simple to do and you can copy a whole disk at a time, but does require a lot of time. One of my customers, Paul Ip, has informed me of a European company who sells a software/hardware program which lets you use an external hard drive and directly copy the contents of one hard drive, zip, etc. into a formated hard drive. You can get more information on this from Paul, who is a frequent writer in this forum. He has helped me quite often with technology questions and is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to using computers with music.
When Paul was here in California several months ago and he saw that I was copying one disk at a time, he explained to me how easy it would be to use the computer to duplicate hard drives. About a month ago he told me of this company supplying all the neccessary componants for doing this.
Paul, if you are seing this post response, please let us know the details for doing this and now that you have the PSR9000 am I correct about being able to copy from the zip of the Roland EM2000 directly to the hard drive of the PSR9000 through the SCSSI port? Have you tried this? Thanks for your help!
George Kaye