pianicaman350

Good to see that you have a -25db cut as default. I have a "setting saved" in Sound Forge at that level. It's the only level that you can play along with .wav files on the PX350 and not over power the 350's levels, or blow/kill it (everything goes black).

Sorry for the delay, I haven't been here for a few weeks now. I believe I have a -20db pad on the sound. I just checked the program and I have -20db and -25db settings to the "volume" adjustment. With the -25db, I can play along with the audio on the flash drive. Have you killed yours?

Yes, but that's from the "internal" system playing 16 lines. I guess, as I haven't tried that yet. I can "overload/kill" my 350 by playing a normal level song "off the flash drive". There's nothing in the manual about levels coming off the flash drive, and listening to them on my laptop, the levels are fairly low.

I have to agree. Sometimes when it looks like it will take forever to log in or just see if anything "new" has been posted, I just give up. I should know better, as I lived in the days of 9600 baud rates, but this is 2013. Maybe the same people who programed the PX-350 also programmed the site too.

I took the same section of music and cut and pasted it in Sound Forge to show the levels of .wav files that I tried to use, and the output level to a flash drive playing the same song with the Px-350's internal settings. The first waveform on the left is the file I copied off a DVD and placed on a USB flash drive to play along with on the 350. This is the file, and it's unaltered level (volume knob set at 12:00 o'clock) that blew the internal circuit breaker in the 350 and it went "black". It came back on again when I pressed the ON/OFF button again, and the speakers seem ok. The second waveform (middle one) is the first one again (after I had learned), but with a 50% cut in the volume level for the file. It is still to HOT to play along with on the 350. To keep this file from overwhelming the speakers, you have to set the 350's volume knob to about the 9:00 o'clock position, and then you can't hear the piano when you play. The last waveform on the right is the same song again, but recorded to the USB flash drive from the PX-350's internal system. This file plays back fine on the 350 at "normal" listening levels, and you can hear both the playback and piano at the same level. I can barely hear the last file when I play it on my laptop in Sound Forge or Media Player with the volume turned all the way up. Click on the file to see full screen. Don't worry, there are no bugs in it, I would not do that to this forum. This should give you a good idea of what you will be dealing with when you try to use .WAV files as the source for song play back accompaniment. If you don't "cut" the volume with an audio editing program first, you will over drive the Px-350's system and pop the circuit breaker, if you haven't blown a speaker too when this happens. I haven't tried this with "amped" auxiliary speakers, but the PX-350's "outs" may really test their limits if you inadvertently play a .WAV file that hasn't been limited to something the 350 can deal with.

For giggles and grins, let us know how long it took you to read the manual to get to where you could actually play a midi or .wav file?

Yes, you can. The midi files play just fine, and are my preferred file format, as they are not volume independent like a .wav file is to the Casio system. The midi file play back volumes can be adjusted in the "set up area". The wav files cannot be adjusted by the Casio system. But, check out any .wav file song you load onto your flash drive and wish to play. Do it with the "volume knob" turned down to a minimum setting the first time you play one. You will probably have to use an Audio Editing program like Sound Forge or the like to "cut the volume" down to a level the Casio's can use. On my 350, I have to reduce the volume levels of .wav files down to almost a flat line in Sound Forge, to play along with them off the flash drive. I didn't know this and blew the internal circuit breaker on the 350. It went black at the first "boom" with the volume set at the 12:00 o'clock position when I hit the Play/Stop button. But it started up again using the on/off button. I though I had just killed my new piano. The manual says nothing about this! Take a .wav file song you want to play along with, and run it through Sound Forge (or it's equivalent) first. Name each one as TAKE01.WAV, TAKE02.WAV, etc. with either increasing or decreasing volume levels. Play each with the volume knob turned way down. Go through your list of TAKEXX.WAV files until you find the "level setting" that works for you. Then when you want to play other songs, you can go back to the "perfect one" and use "it's" level as your baseline for all others. I'm in the process of "re-leveling" around 100 songs that are To Hot for the 350 to handle as they now are. But YMMV.

Finding and reading a PX-780 manual without having the actual piano in front of you will just lead you down the primrose path. The 780 being so close to the 350 in specks, they will probably share the same manual with a few exceptions in button placement, but those may actually be the same, as I haven't seen a close up of the "screen area" of a 780 yet. You will find that if they do share most of the same manual, have plenty of aspirin on hand when you try to figure out how to make it work. Also as a "WARNING" do not play .wav files off the USB flash drive with the 780's volume knob set higher than the 9:00 o'clock position. You will "over drive" the speakers and may blow the internal circuit breaker and it will go "black" before your eyes. It will start up again (mine did) when you press the on/off button again. Use an audio program like Sound Forge to reduce the volume of any .wav files you want to play on the 780. You will have to reduce the volume a lot to be able to "play along" with the .wav file. Midi (.mid) files do not seem to have this problem. But if you have the CD's from the Alfred training books, they have high volume levels for playing on every other type of player, but not the PX's circuits, where they will blow the speakers if the volume knob is not turned down.

I did a test today on another flash drive I had. Last night I let the 350 format the extra flash drive I had, and then went an recorded several songs from the keyboard to the mounted flash drive. I wanted a "clean" flash drive, and only the files that the 350 had created, and only the songs that "it" recorded in those files. Today, I opened the TAKE wave files in Sound Forge to check the "levels" (volume levels) of the songs I had recorded off the 350 last nigh. When they opened in Sound Forge, they were just little thick bands of black above and below the "0" base line. When I played them back on my laptop, I had to turn off Classic King FM to even barely hear the tune that was playing. The peaks were at +/- 20.6 db. Getting close to a flat line at the normal Sound Forge opening page, without zooming in. I then opened up the original song .wav files I wanted to originally use (before I made them .WAV) and I was getting peaks of +/- 6.0 db. No wonder I blew out the internal circuit breaker and my 350 went black on me. I would have too. Even with a 50% reduction to the original files, they were still coming in at +/- 12.0 db and still way to hot to play at even half volume on the 350 knob. I'm thinking that the PX-350 records songs internally at microphone input levels, and saves them on flash drives at the same levels. I need to hook up my laptop to the PX-350's "outs" and see what those levels are. Will let you know, if someone doesn't already know and posts that info here.

As you have read in my "Lost in Translation" post, things haven't been going as I would like them. For the last two nights I have been trying to play back some songs that started as Takexx.wav then TAKEXX.wav, and finally TAKEXX.WAV They will play back with the last file name format. BUT! there seems to be no way to control the volume of the songs on the USB Flash Drive when played back on the PX-350. I went through the instructions in the section "Other Settings", and the section on "Configuring Settings". I was able to get into the #4 "Volume Level Group" and then on to sub-section 4-3, for adjusting the "Song Volume". It has no effect on .WAV file songs being played off the USB. It will adjust the volume of the Midi files on the Flash Drive though. So I went back to square one, to the fact that I can't play along on the keyboard "with" .WAV files coming off the Flash Drive. I can play along with the Midi files I made. I used a "freeware" program I found online. It's www.musescore.org I liked this program the first time I tried it, and uninstalled a copy of Anvil Studio I had been trying to figure out. I even PayPal'd them money. I would turn the volume knob down and queue up one of the .WAV files on the Flash Drive. That worked, and I could listen to the song, but the sound from the keyboard isn't even audible. So I would turn down the volume for listening to .WAV files, and then turn it up again to hear the keyboard. You know there's something coming with this. In my confusion of who's on first, I forgot to turn the volume knob down with I pressed Play/Stop with a .WAV file loaded. I get a "boom" with the first note and the piano goes "BLACK". Shuts down completely. BUT the gods have been smiling on me, so when I press the "ON" button again, the 350 comes back online. Seems to be ok, and I don't think I have a blown speaker. Looking through the User Manual, I find no mention to the fact that the PX-350 has a self preservation sub-system to protect it from people like me. I did take all the .WAV files and "redo them again" in Sound Forge, to put a 50% volume reduction to all 60+ files. I will no longer use .WAV files on my PX-350. It will be only Midi files I make with musescore . Interesting reading on page E-62 RH column, second paragraph (all caps) Must have been thinking of me.

An update on the "Exit" button. I was wrong. When you hit the Exit button in instruction #4, it only clears the current screen. The song queued up is still there and hitting the Play/Stop button make the selected song play or stop. I think I would have written instruction #4 as: "With your song selected in memory, you can press (EXIT) and return to the main screen. The song will start when you press Play/Stop and will stop when you press Play/Stop again. Sorry for the out burst, but things have not been going as expected with my new purchase. As you will see in my post on playing back .WAV files.

Do you have another set of speakers you can use??? When you plug in the extra speakers, the one's on the PX-350 so silent, so you can then tell if it's the internal speakers or if something else is loose inside. The trouble with GC is that there's a bit too much hanky panky going on in the shipping room. The store in South Seattle had a SP-32 hooked up to a PX-350. The 32 doesn't work with the 350, and it's hard to say how many sales they lost because players thought it was broken. I had my 350 set direct to me from Casio's Chicago warehouse via FedEx. It looked like it had been hand carried when the FedEx man gave it to me.

More fun with the Owners Manual yesterday. I found that the PX350 "only" recognizes the "take" files if it's ALL IN CAPS. So after three attempts with Takexx.wav, TAKExx.wav, it finally worked (with other problems) when they were TAKEXX.WAV That seems really strange, as I've never had to cap file extensions. Then it was back to the 350 to play these tunes. I go to page E-42 in the manual, and follow the "Playing Along with Data Recorded on a USB Flash Drive" instructions. Which are different that what's said on page E-52 "Playing Back a Song on a USB Flash Drive". In the second instructions on page E-52 you do the Function/Audio Recorder buttons thing, then the up and down arrows to get to your song. Then it's play/stop to listen to them. Pretty straight forward. But when you follow the instructions on page E-42 you hit "Audio Recorder" first, then the Function/Audio Recorder buttons. Use the up/down arrows to get to your song. I'm finding that it's working and I have a file number listed in the screen, so I follow instruction #4 "press the (EXIT) button. ????? The screen goes back to the start. ???? I tried this four times, when it dawned on me that I was "Lost in Translation" again. DO NOT press EXIT! So I skipped instruction #4 and hit the play/stop button and lo and behold, my song played. But when I went to up/down to another song, a "wrong data" screen came up, so I will try it again with a new set of renamed .wav, sorry .WAV files. I wanted to give my 350 a nice name, but I don't want to keep calling it $%^&*.

I noticed when I'm not playing and I press the sustain pedal it sounds like there's an air leak inside. Probably part of the system, but strange.

Yesterday I didn't know whether I was going to take a hammer to my new PX-350 or a pair of scissors to the USER (not so friendly) Manual. After many, many reads forwards and backwards (the manual is actually written that way.) of trying to figure out what, where, and how to get the 350 to read the files I had on my flash drive, I gave up to see what I could learn here. Not much as it seems a bit early in this forums history for a lot of info to be shared. I tried the first time with a couple of midi files, in the musiclib slot and in the A slot of the Play directory. They played the way they should. I then tried to add some MP3 files, but they are not recognized, so I changed them to WAV. files. Seems the PX-350 doesn't recognize those either no mater what folder you stick them in. So it was make a trip here to see if I could find any info, and I think I found that I have to rename all the WAV. files to Take01, Take02, etc. As though I would know what Take47 would be without looking it up somewhere where "I" had written it down. So now I will have to rename 60+ files and not lose my direction along the way. I was thinking of getting a "5 head" rated Katana and buying a ticket to Japan. I may still take scissors to the User Manual to see if I can put the pages and topics in some order that makes sense. Wonder how the translations are in other languages??? Take must be the only word that's universal.