This video, via Alex S, demonstrates how to upgrade a vintage synthesizer with a USB floppy drive emulator.
00:00 Introduction, bla bla
00:38 Installing the Hardware
08:10 Loading a voice patch from a USB stick
13:18 preparing USB stick for use
13:35 where to get the software
14:51 formating the USB stick
15:45 opening a virtual floppy drive
16:03 copying a file onto the stick
16:30 syncing your files to the virtual floppy drive
17:19 where to get the hardware
USB floppy drive emulators are available inexpensively on Amazon.
If you’ve done a similar upgrade to your vintage keyboard, share your experience in the comments!
Haha thats the exact keyboard I got an emulator to replace the drive in. Convenient!
does anyone know if there is floppy emulator software for Mac?
Yes. There is.
I mddc go do this for my W30. The floppy has mortally broken.
same here. I miss my old W-30 and lost the core disks to boot up. This would be very handy.
I’m curious if this will work with an old sampler (Emu and/or Ensoniq).
Damn. I wonder if I could do this to my korg karma
Older Ensoniq synths don’t use a standard 1.44 MB DOS format and need a more sophisticated driver emulator. I’ve been looking at the Lotharek drive but haven’t tried it out yet.
I use a lotharek drive on my Korg DSS1, it works really fine. With a small lcd screen showing the name of the bank you are loading. Really useful.
I’ve replaced the floppy drive with a USB emulator on my Kurzweil K2000 and Triton rack… the only (small) problem is that I can only find a USB partitioning program that allows you 100x 1.4Mb partitions no matter what size the USB stick is… this leads to a lot of unused empty space … it would be great to be able to use up all of the available space on the USB stick… other than that, it works a treat.