28 Sep
2015
28 Sep
'15
12:07 a.m.
PS: Contact AppleCare and ask them to recommend a USB floppy drive they
know will work with your system. - David
On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 12:04 AM, David Roth <davidalanroth(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Duncan.
Perhaps it needs some special driver or additional software needs to be
installed for the USB floppy drive to work on the Mac? I'm guessing, since
it doesn't even recognize the drive at all, that could be the case. But it
might not have what is needed in the firmware so the Mac can communicate
with it.
Even though I'm a Mac user, I have an old Gateway computer a neighbor
wanted to recycle that has a built-in 3.5 floppy drive. I've installed
CentOS Linux on it. I used the Linux 'dd' command to read Roland sampler
disks on it. I then use the software to read and extract the sound files.
This product, which I have no experience with at all, claims to support
Mac OS 8.6 or above:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16821103402
David Roth
On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 11:42 PM, Duncan Malashock <
duncanmalashock(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi David,
Thanks for your reply.
To answer your question, the disk drive I bought doesn't mount the disks
on my Mac. It's as though I'd never put them into the disk drive. I naively
thought it would support 720K DD as well as HD disks. After re-reading its
Amazon page
<http://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-External-Floppy-Drive-SBT-UFDB/dp/B000ALM3RC> it
seems unlikely that it would.
I was going to return it and look for a Mac-compatible drive that does
support 720K DD. But I thought I'd ask the crowd here first, since you
might have suggestions on which drive to buy or whether it's even possible
to write the disks in the correct format on Mac OS X Yosemite (neither of
which I'm sure about after reading the various webpages on the S-550).
Best,
Duncan
On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 11:31 PM, David Roth <davidalanroth(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Duncan.
Using the Mac and the USB floppy drive, when you put in a floppy disk
what does the Mac say or do about it? Does it try to initialize it? Or it
ignore it? Or does it give an error?
If you have a spare floppy disk, I would try to format the disk with the
Mac and the USB floppy drive to any format it would handle, just to make
sure the hardware and the connection it working properly. You might then be
able to use Disk Utility to format it MS-DOS or perhaps FAT. There might be
some tools for the Mac to be able to format this to MS-DOS, I'm not sure.
For the longest time I believe floppy disks came new formatted for MS-DOS.
If you are able to format (any format) a floppy disk with your Mac and
verify that you can put some files on it, then you have a working system to
proceed. If you can't do that, then it could be the drive has a hardware
problem and in that case, I would try connecting it to another system (Mac
or PC) and see if it works there to determine there isn't a problem with
that specific Mac.
David Roth
On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 6:35 PM, Duncan Malashock <
duncanmalashock(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Sgroup,
How's it going? First time posting to the group, so thanks for having
me.
I recently purchased an S-550 and love the sound. I'm mostly interested
in
using those great samples that I'm sure you've all heard in the Sunday
Paper
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-_YmUmAMwU> demo. I'm hoping that the
seasoned experts among you may be able to help me make that a reality.
My unit came with two system disks, and it seemed like only one of them
loaded completely. Through doing program changes I was able to get a
couple
samples working (one of a string section and one of an orchestra hit).
I'm
finding it very difficult to see what samples are available through the
front panel. I had hoped the Sunday Paper samples were pre-installed,
but
it seemed trying to load the samples I was after was going to take more
work.
So my next step was to try to write disk images to floppies to use in
the
S-500. I tracked down 10 DD 720K disks (old stock, not the new ones
which
I've heard are unreliable), and the RSB sample library in .OUT format
<http://llamamusic.com/s50s550/unusual_samples.html>. I'm on a Macbook
Pro
running OS X Yosemite, so SMAC doesn't seem like a possibility, and the
Sabrent USB floppy drive I bought doesn't seem to read the DD disks. So
right now I'm stuck.
Thanks for reading this far. Can anyone help me find a way to write
these
disk images to the floppies using my Mac? Many thanks for any help.
All best,
Duncan
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