Yamaha RM1X OS V1.13

MY GOOGLE DRIVE - RM1X OS V1.13

I bought the above sequencer about 6 months ago for controlling my various external synths - I had seen some great videos of people using it for jamming, and the depth of the real time control and its ease of use really appealed to me.  It felt like it could be the single, central master device that would allow me to banish the computer to recording only.  Oh how wrong I was.

Ok, that isn't strictly true.  It just didn't do what I expected it to do, and the cuplrit was a buggy operating system.  It worked perfectly provided I was only using the internal sounds, but I wasn't interested in the internal sounds, I just wanted it for MIDI generation.  The internal sounds are to my tastes dated and thin - I've never been much of a fan of Yamaha's AWM engines.  The MIDI bug is that it sends a program change message at the beginning of the phrase each time it loops, even if you try to filter it out within the RM1X.

It's a well known bug that people have been complaining about since it launched.  Yamaha offered an OS replacement, where you paid for a new chip and provided you sent the old one back you got a refund.  Roll on nearly 15 years and Yamaha service centres around the world have different responses - many can't even supply them any more.  I was quoted £65 plus shipping, with no refund.  If you ask me, that's terrible service for supplying a feature that should be available straight out of the box.

I gave up hope of trying to fix it and lent it to a friend - I didn't want it's sounds, I have plenty of instruments that sound much better.  Meanwhile I would hunt around for a copy of the OS.  Long story short, there was no .bin file I could find to burn myself, and the only Ebay seller I could find wouldn't ship outside the US.

Through the RM1X yahoo group a great guy called Ivan Schwartz offered to send me his chip so I could copy it.  And so we now have an image of the final version OS V1.13 available.  If you want to burn your own copy, you will need an EPROM programmer capable of programming 27C160 EPROMs.  These are 16 bit chips and many of the cheaper programmers are not capable.

I am able to program them, so contact me if you would like me to burn you one - email me at analogmonster at live dot com or leave a comment and I will get back to you.  I cant give you an exact price as it depends how cheaply I got them myself, but I am certainly going to be cheaper than getting them from Yamaha - I would expect around £5 plus shipping.

If you want to burn them yourself I have made the file available at my google drive, along with a checksum.

Custom Kawai R50/100 Roms Are A No Go

Ok, it's official.  I give up.  No matter how hard I try I cannot get custom roms working for the Kawai R50/R100 drum machines, it is beyond my capabilities.  I have many other projects on the go and I cannot commit the time needed to figure it out.  I might come back to it in the future but don't count on it.  Maybe someone else will figure it out.

I was using Awave Studio, which is a great file format converter with a huge file type support list.  It lists .kawai12 as experimental support.  It opens the kawai EPROM bin files directly, and you can use the built in player to confirm this.  I set Sony Soundforge as the external audio editor and it opens in Soundforge.

Now as a test I didn't edit it at all, and used this original data to make a new .kawai12 file using Awave.  This burns to an EPROM which sounds identical to my original ROM and when repitching doesn't suffer the digital distortion I have been suffering from with my custom files.  I take this to mean Awave does the conversion correctly, provided the source sample data is correct.

So my attempts to do custom roms start with opening the original data in Soundforge and placing a marker at the zero crossings closest to the beginning of each hit.  I also have each individual new hit open in their own window.  These samples have been pitch shifted up 7 semitones, normalized, trimmed to the length of the hit it is replacing and converted into the same format as the original data - 16 bit mono 48k.  I then select all of the new hit and copy it, open the original waveform and highlight the hit it will be replacing, and overwrite (not paste).  Rinse, wash and repeat.

Close all the individual hit windows so that the only window open is your new sample data.  Close Soundforge and this data will open up in Awave.  Save as .kawai12 and burn your rom.  You get something that kind of works, but is not right.  If you figure it out, please let me know.