George,

For Frankieve, I think the best method of song transfer from Roland EM2000 to Yamaha 9000 Pro is using an external SCSI Zip drive. I actually have an older Zip Plus drive that is both parallel and SCSI (with a special adapter). All that Frankieve has to do is to hook up an external SCSI Zip drive to his EM2000 keyboard, making sure that the SCSI ID does not conflict with the internal one (if the SCSI ID of EM2000 internal ZIP drive is 5, then set the SCSI ID of the external SCSI Zip drive to 6). Mount the external SCSI Zip drive and just select all MIDI files from the internal SCSI Zip drive and copy them to the external SCSI Zip drive. After the files have been copied, Frankieve can then hook up the external SCSI Zip drive to the SCSI port of the Yamaha 9000 Pro for copying the MIDI files.

There are two limitations of MIDI files on current Yamaha PSR9000 / 9000 Pro keyboards:
1. Each hard disk folder/directory can only hold up to 250 files;
2. At current OS level, there is no provision of chain playing MIDI files.

As for Solton SD-1, since it does not have any SCSI connections, the above method does not work. Copying through floppy is the cheapest way in media, but most expensive in terms of time. I did mention a Germany company that manufactures USB (Universal Serial Bus) interface for PSR9000 and Korg I30, but I don't think they have anything for Solton X1/SD-1 yet. If you are interested you can follow the following older posting: http://www.synthworld.com/ubbs/Forum37/HTML/001050.html

I found a very effective way of duplicating notebook IDE hard drives. I bought a PCMCIA to notebook IDE drive enclosure, which came with drivers for me to use in Windows 9x command mode. The drive enclosure looks like this:

My notebook PC has a LS120 super floppy drive (120 MB per media, compatible with good old 3.5" floppies) with Windows 98 boot image, config.sys and autoexec.bat files that contains the PCMCIA to IDE enclosure support. Using software package like Norton Ghost, I am able to copy from partition of the source disk to an image file on the notebook PC's internal IDE disk. I recommend partitioning and formatting your new laptop IDE hard disk with your keyboard (if you purchase an optional hard disk for your keyboard that comes with nothing on it). Then swap out the source disk with a new/destination disk in the PCMCIA to IDE disk enclosure, I can clone a partition on the new/destination hard disk from the disk image file in less than 10 minutes. My PCMCIA to notebook IDE disk enclosure has never been really closed - I let it sit open so I can clone disks any time I want, like a disk cloning station, for ease of operations.

Since Solton SD-1 comes with a 6 GB internal IDE disk, I do not recommend disk cloning, but file appending. This is even easier. With the PCMCIA to notebook IDE disk enclosure, you can take out the SD-1 disk and put it in the enclosure. With a USB Zip drive, you can put the EM2000 Zip disk in so the Windows 98 notebook can copy all the MIDI files from the USB ZIP drive to the SD-1 hard disk in very easy Windows Explorer manipulation in a matter of a few minutes. The most time consuming portion is to take out the SD-1 hard disk, but this is only a one time deal. While the SD-1 hard disk is in the PCMCIA disk enclosure, all of its contents can be copied again into either a disk image file or actual files in a particular folder in the notebook PC, which you can eventually dump it into a CDR or CDRW media for cheap and reliable backup or disk cloning source.

I hope the above explains a little bit further so you understand how I clone/backup keyboard disks.

Regards,

Paul Ip
from Texas