Extracting midi data off of 3.5 inch floppy discs

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PorterhouseMusic

PorterhouseMusic

Mitakuye Oyasin
I'm putting this here because it's not clear to me where the best place to put it is.

I'm wanting - perhaps needing is a better word - to hire someone to go through a bunch of 3.5 inch floppy discs, extract the midi data off of them - and somehow transfer the performance material to digital media of some type.

My grandfather who died about 13 years ago at the age of 95 was a lifelong pianist. I believe there are compositions of his on these discs and, for obvious reasons, would love to access these.

Does anyone here have any idea how I might best go about getting something like that done? Any ideas? Leads?
 
It would probably be helpful to know how the disks were created. In the late 80s, you had a lot of people doing MIDI music on Atari ST computers since it came with MIDI ports. Fortunately, 720K Atari ST floppies should be readable on a PC, so if they are just .MID files, then you should be good to go. Once you have the files, you should be able to feed them into any piano plug-in.

There were quite a few music programs for the ST back then. I don't know if they all saved in standard .MID format. If they were created on PC, the there shouldn't be a problem reading them. PCs, Amigas and Macs would have needed MIDI interfaces, which weren't cheap. Amiga and Mac floppies are not natively read by PCs.

The USB Floppy drive is definitely worth trying for $20.

Good luck.
 
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Having started in the late 80's, I have a little experience in the topic (a little). Depending on the sequencer, they either saved the files with 16 tracks (10 being reserved for drums). That was a part of the "General MIDI" standard. You should be able to drag and drop it into any DAW that does MIDI. The problem is, it might treat it as one MIDI track, so you might have to do some editing post import.

If you can read the disk, the MIDI 1.0 is still in use today. Just getting back into it deeper, now there is MIDI 2.0 (still backward compatible) and that is expanded for MPE.

If can get to the files, you should not have any problems as long as it was created after, I think 1986. That is when General MIDI was adopted.
 
I've ordered the drive. I've got the floppies stored somewhere here in the house - I'll locate those today. He had been composing on a really.nice high end Kurzweil or Yamaha console piano/keyboard as I recall. I think I've got a photo of it somewhere in the archives - I'll find that too which may help figure out what format this stuff is in.

Sounds like a good start. Thanks for the input gents!
 
Good advice here.
Seems unlikely but if the data is some proprietary format or otherwise difficult to process it's possible you could emulate the computer and software that he used quite easily.
I'll not go in to detail here as that's an unlikely plan B but emulation of 80s systems is very popular now, particularly for gaming.

There's also plenty of free software available that can 1 to 1 imaging of floppy disks.
That would get you a safe digital backup without any issues with unrecognised file systems or hidden files or any of that.

I can get you more info on all of this if needed but hopefully the disks are readable and just contain midi files as others have suggested.

Needless to say if your modern PC doesn't understand the discs it will probably say "do you want to format?"
Don't do that. :ROFLMAO:
 
One thing you might need to research since it was a high end system, how he used the sounds on that equipment. The General MIDI only listed "general" sounds, so the equipment itself probably went beyond that standard. You might have to see if he left notes or something to say what patches/setting he used on the actual equipment. MIDI just didn't go that far back then or equipment manufactures interpreted the standard rather loosely. But you could always use that as a base to expand the music.
 
Been 'KING years since I have handled one but on the "do you want to format" front, I am sure floppies had a protection tab/slider of some sort? Makes sense to check that and make sure it is engaged before insertion.

Dave. (must have a couple somewhere? Got sheds of MDs)
 
The 3.5's had a switch, the floppies had a tab cut out. To overwrite, if I remember correctly, you just put tape over the cutout. I think.

I still have both somewhere, cause I don't throw away stuff. I think I still have a 3.5 drive, but no longer have the 5 1/4. I never had the 8's.
 
DM60 said:
One thing you might need to research since it was a high end system, how he used the sounds on that equipment. The General MIDI only listed "general" sounds, so the equipment itself probably went beyond that standard. You might have to see if he left notes or something to say what patches/setting he used on the actual equipment. MIDI just didn't go that far back then or equipment manufactures interpreted the standard rather loosely. But you could always use that as a base to expand the music.
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MIDI han't changed very much at all - and 1990s MIDI plays happily. The real snag will be the faffing around, as said, to make things do what they did back then. I can load up old files, but with the exception of drums which stayed on ch 10, I changed my own system year on year as I bought new kit. So I had at one time, a Roland GS on channels 1-3, yamaha KG on 4-8, a proteus on 9 and my other synths had random channels as they came and went.

If you are lucky, they will load with everything on a single MIDI channel. Sustain pedal CC on 64 is pretty standard, but might be tweaked. I reckon confidence is high you can work the patch out if it was mainly piano, and save it as a template that you can just load the MIDI into. However, I'd be prepared to bet the files are not MIDI (.mid) but in the proprietary format of his early sequencer - the things we had before DAWs. Loads of my stuff was recorded in early versions of Cubase - and only files I have loaded and resaved over the versions will load. Cubase now, for example, will NOT load on Cubase Lite I used in the 90s, or Cubase version 3 (I think) This would be a big problem. Few folk back then stored the sequencer stuff as MIDI, because it lacked facilities - you used MIDI for swapping with different sequencers, but I hope this is not the case for you. I have never saved a project as a MIDI file for general storage, ever. Only as a transfer format.
 
rob aylestone said:
MIDI han't changed very much at all - and 1990s MIDI plays happily. The real snag will be the faffing around, as said, to make things do what they did back then. I can load up old files, but with the exception of drums which stayed on ch 10, I changed my own system year on year as I bought new kit. So I had at one time, a Roland GS on channels 1-3, yamaha KG on 4-8, a proteus on 9 and my other synths had random channels as they came and went.

If you are lucky, they will load with everything on a single MIDI channel. Sustain pedal CC on 64 is pretty standard, but might be tweaked. I reckon confidence is high you can work the patch out if it was mainly piano, and save it as a template that you can just load the MIDI into. However, I'd be prepared to bet the files are not MIDI (.mid) but in the proprietary format of his early sequencer - the things we had before DAWs. Loads of my stuff was recorded in early versions of Cubase - and only files I have loaded and resaved over the versions will load. Cubase now, for example, will NOT load on Cubase Lite I used in the 90s, or Cubase version 3 (I think) This would be a big problem. Few folk back then stored the sequencer stuff as MIDI, because it lacked facilities - you used MIDI for swapping with different sequencers, but I hope this is not the case for you. I have never saved a project as a MIDI file for general storage, ever. Only as a transfer format.
Click to expand...
Ah, you know Rob, you're right. I remember I had a sequencer named Ballad 2, Cakewalk was on the market, but ya know, had to pick something (I always pick wrong, I purchased a Beta VCR) . Lucky for me, I had a Ballad to MIDI converter. But I forgot about that part. Good call.
 
I remember that there were keyboards with floppy drives before people used computers. A fellow that I worked with had a keyboard, maybe Ensoniq, that used floppy drives to save songs. I think his Yamaha might have also had a floppy. I don't know what format those keyboards used. If you know the device used, you might be able to find that info, and maybe program to read the info if it's not PC format.
 
Good point on the 3.5's. They're technically "diskettes" - not floppies. Been a while for all of us. And yeah - I think they've got that little slider for write-protection. Someone else mentioned that elsewhere - I'll be sure to check that. Thanks for the reminder.

This stuff was created around 2005 to 2011 - roughly. He was upgrading his piano as the newest nicest stuff would roll out - but I think the material that I have was all done on this last unit. Again - I think I've got photos of it somewhere - I locate pictures if I can as that might be helpful.
 
Most disks post 80's used fat16 (I might be wrong on that) 8.3 type reading. It was not proprietary if I remember correctly. So, 2000's, other than MIDI 2.0 coming along, you should be good with the disks, but proprietary binaries might be an issue to TRs point.
 
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