ARE THERE ANY NEWER SMF PLAYERS OUT THERE?

[lonewolf]

I am looking for a modern Standard Midi File player suitable to use as a 1-man band backing tracks unit. I have the old Roland Sound Brush technology with the 720K floppy disk drives.

I put a disk in the tabletop SD-35 and it works great...take the same disk to my rackmount SB-55 and DISK ERROR!!!!! JP, I believe you may recall one of the last appearances of LoneWolf (at EOSJ) where I had a disk error and managed to get the backup running. That is the present status of my LW equipment.

Does anybody know of any rack mount SMF Players with some kind of electronic storage like USB memory, smartmedia, etc. available? I'd like to get one with GM2 sounds in it, but a basic playback unit would work.

There are a lot of options for non-rack mount stuff, but all the companies seem to have forgotten rack mount gear in favor of goofy-assed POD stuff with those ever-stage-worthy WALL WARTS.

Excuse my rant, but its been this way for 10 years.

I might consider a table top unit if it has some extras like good vocal harmony or really good and easy to use guitar FX.

[alfred]

i use a computer plugged into the mixer, nothing fancy but no more carrying
disk and no chance of disk error and skips. look ma no hands.

[lonewolf]

i use a computer plugged into the mixer, nothing fancy but no more carrying
disk and no chance of disk error and skips. look ma no hands.

MIDI out shouldn't be a problem, but what about a footswitch start/stop and the quality of the synth sounds?

[alfred]

start and stoping is done by a friend running the mixer. sound quality?
it sounds go to me. if not the people aint drinking enough.

[lonewolf]

I just fixed my disk problem...it seems that Windows XP doesn't support formatting and writing 720K floppy drives, but the XP command prompt using the DOS commands FORMAT and COPY work fine. Even when the disk was formatted properly, I couldn't drag and drop the midi files in XP, but COPY *.* A: worked fine.

Back in business...

That gives me some breathing room to find another solution. I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for a cheap notebook to try out.

You can get a footswitch to midi converter or a simple MIDI footswitch to send start/stop commands, but they can cost you.

I already have the Roland VSC-88 soft synth that I got for $10 with Powertracks Pro. Do you have an open-source/freeware MIDI playlist program?

[alfred]

no, i just have backing tracks. i dont know much about midi files
and all that other stuff. i wish i did.

[BloodyFingers]

I use a laptop running sonar and ez drummer. I just load the project file out of my main computer into the laptop and it works great...