While many digital pianos have built-in tools for learning and making music, you can expand your possibilities even further through your PC. A digital piano can be easily connected to your Windows or Mac computer opening up a universe of music education, composition, and recording software to explore. How to clean up macbook air.
One of the main reasons you might wish to connect your piano to a computer is to record your performances either for self-evaluation for sharing via social media or for sending to family and friends. When you record yourself playing on a digital piano, you are recording data and not actual sound. There is a big difference and some big benefits! Recording data means all of the actions you make when you play a piece — both key presses and control actions. This data is stored in a format known as SMF which means standard midi file and this data format allows you to do many things that you couldn’t do with a simple audio recording.
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For example, if you recorded the right hand part of a piece, you could slow it down while practising the left hand. You could perhaps change the sound if you didn’t like the instrument. If you recorded your piece straight into a PC, you could even edit individual notes. It is worth noting that some pianos give you the option to record your performance as SMF data or audio – useful if you want to transfer it to a PC and email or burn a CD – no need to have dedicated recording software on a PC that will read SMF data.
How Do You Connect? Best storage for macbook pro.
Connecting your piano to a computer is very simple. All you need to send MIDI data from your digital piano to your computer and back again is a USB cable. There are however, two types of USB connector – Type A and Type B. Type A is a “USB to Device,” connector and allows direct connection to a variety of external memory-storage devices such as a USB key. Type B is a “USB to Host,” connector and allows connection to computers. If you plan to use these connections, you need to check the type of USB connections available on the instruments you’re considering. Simply stating “USB” in the specifications doesn’t tell you the type of USB connectivity provided.
Just like a digital camera or printer a digital piano needs a bit of software called a Driver – so you will have to install a driver for your digital piano – all of the major digital piano manufacturers are very good at providing these at no charge. And that’s about it. Permute 3 1 9 esv.
Some older digital pianos might not have a USB socket – that doesn’t mean you can’t connect to a computer. Instead of using a USB socket, you can use MIDI sockets. MIDI was originally developed by Roland as a way of connecting two musical instruments together and these MIDI sockets were how you connected them together. Since personal computers don’t have these sockets, connecting a digital piano to a computer requires an adapter that has the MIDI-standard DIN connector on one end, and a computer-friendly connector on the other.
Once you’re connected and you have your digital piano and PC fired up, you’re ready to explore the world of learning, composing and recording!
As we get closer to Field Day 2017 and the summer VHF contest season I decided it was time to build (or in my case find) a serial port keying interface to use between the logging computer and the radio. Sketchup online free.
Back in the early 2000’s I was active on 144 MHz EME (Earth Moon Earth) with around 700W and a 4 square of CC13B2 from grid FN54. It was a quickly thrown together station with the preamp in the shack, but it worked and got me on the air, working several countries and stateside stations. JT65 and high speed meteor scatter software was just starting to be developed, so 99% of the moon bounce activity was still good old CW.
Transmit CW for a minute, receive for a minute until the QSO was completed. I had built a small CW interface between my Texas Instruments laptop (running Windows 95) to the FT-847 radio. This would allow me to pre-program my CW sequences and with a function key select the right sequence and transmit them for the 1 minute cycles. I was using the old Log-EQF software (DOS version), to handle sending the CW and I remember that whenever I would open a new window or a new program on the laptop when I was sending, the CW I was sending would S L O W down as the computer processor was being tasked to do other things. Ha! I quickly made a point to not do anything else on that computer when it was sending CW.
So, after tearing down the EME station and moving 3000 miles across the country, the interface I built got tucked away somewhere “safe” (you all know what that means), and I moved out of Maine and into Arizona.
Flash forward to 2017 and the preparation for Field Day 2017 with the Queen Creek group. In 2016 we did real well compared to the previous years, however, we quickly discovered that we need to focus on CW if we want to place higher in the event. One solution that will help new CW operators is to have a CW interface from the logging computer, so they do not have to send with a key, but rather listen, and type the call sign of the station calling into the software and let the logging software call/ reply to the station. Pretty slick, and it takes away a lot of the stress from the new CW operator from having to worry about having a “poor fist”.
So, if you want to do this, what options do you have?
Plenty!
Back in my EME days, I went with the quick and dirty interface that was shown on the N1MM page.
This is to be used with a DB9 serial port on the computer, or with a USB to serial adapter, The pins of the serial port is used to drive a 2N2222 or BC547 transistor for keying.
– 1K resistor from serial port pin to Base of the 2N2222
– Emitter to ground (or maybe through a current limiting resistor)
– Collector to TX line of radio
Another option that uses both the RTS and DTR pins (one for PTT, the other sending CW) is here. Same design, just a bit cleaner in the diagram. This way one set of pins can send CW, another can key the transmitter to send voice of RTTY or some other mode, all in the same serial DB9 connection.
Then make the interface. I went super ugly style and put it on a small perf board, and stuck it all in an old 35mm film container. #Vintage
From there, I added a 3.5mm stereo jack to connect the 3.5mm stereo to stereo cable that would then connect to my FT-817 or FT-857, as both have the smaller 3.5mm keying jack.
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