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January 1, 2009
Fur Elise
I recently hooked up the new Yamaha PSR-E303 (YPT-300) keyboard to the Sony Vaio laptop via a Yamaha UX-16 MIDI-USB interface. I followed the directions and loaded the drivers and got the interface working. That is to say that I could play a MIDI file on the PC through the Yamaha keyboard. It's pretty slick in that it's somewhat like an old school "player piano", as it shows you what keys it's playing as it plays the music.
But what I really wanted to do, of course, was record files on the keyboard and then copy them to the computer. So, I checked the User Manual(when all else fails, RTFM) and it said to download and install Yamaha's Musicsoft Downloader application which I did and I must say that Musicsoft Downloader is weak. It is precious little more than a miserable, pathetic little piece of watered down DRM. What it does, so far as I can tell, is this - It provides a confusing little GUI so that you can copy files between PC and keyboard. Great. But here is the catch - you can record up to 5 files on the keyboard, and when you "Back Up" these files to your PC, all five recorded songs come across in one file, logically named 05PK.USR. This is a proprietary file format and nothing on earth can open it. So, great Yamaha. Thanks for that.
Of course, I was royally p1ssed and ready to take the keyboard out back and put a few rounds through it with the AR-15. But instead, I settled down a tad and figured that, even though I couldn't find any posts describing a solution on the web, there had to be a way to do what I wanted.
So, I googled a bit for a free MIDI Sequencer and I found this website where they appeared to recommend trying Anvil Studio. So I went and downloaded Anvil Studio and in about 5 minutes, I'd figured out how to record tracks from my keyboard. The tracks are saved as MIDI files, and I tried to convert them in Audacity, but my version of Audacity (1.2.6) doens't offer much in the way of MIDI support. (The new Audacity 1.3.6 Beta has some new MIDI features, so you can import, cut and paste, and export MIDI files, but you still can't play them apparently).
I was finally able to convert the MIDI files to MP3 files by following these directions. Basically, what I did was set my Recording Control to "Stereo Mix", which essentially says "record what I'm playing through the speakers". Then, I launched Audacity 1.2.6, hit "Record", and then played the MIDI version of the file with QuickTime. When it finished, I saved the file as an .mp3 file and uploaded it. (Note: Every sound card will have different options when you go into the "Record" controls. The sound card in the computer I was working at did not have a "Mixed Output" or "Stereo Mix" option, so I just used a different PC that had a different sound card - I have 5 computers running here at the trailer, so this was easy.)
Of course, my main goal in all of this was to share my latest performance of Fur Elise with my sister Molly, as I was forced to listen to her learn to play this song 30 years ago, and I've heard tell that turnabout is fair play, is it not?
You should be able to play my latest miserable attempt at the first two pages of Fur Elise with either of the following file formats in Windows Media Player or QuickTime:
MIDI file - Fur_Elise_1.mid
MP3 file - Fur_Elise_1.mp3
Posted by Rob Kiser on January 1, 2009 at 6:52 PM
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