Cameron MacKenzie

^-----^ Noted.

When in doubt, read the instructions. The PDF help manual for Magix is 478 pages, and I had merely skimmed through it. Today I read the part on MIDI connections more carefully, and saw that there were some additional selections I needed to make with the mouse when preparing to make a MIDI track from an outside machine (digital piano). Also, the Casio apparently has to be on and connected before Magix is started. Success! The Casio was silent while the virtual piano played out of the computer speakers while I pecked at the Casio. A bar-graph-looking thing formed itself in the active track, and it can be played back and manipulated for note duration and pitch. I still can't get my alternate (preferred) method to work-- Casio voice through an audio cable. I may send away for one of the "glorified sound cards" happyrat linked to.

Those links are appreciated. I'll do my due diligence on them.

Update for your amusement / schadenfreude I bought a 6-foot cable with 1/8" plugs at each end, and bought a 1/8" - to -1/4" adaptor. As I expected, inserting the adaptor into the back of the Casio cuts out the Casio speakers, since the purpose of that jack is to spare one's family members from hearing the Casio while the person playing it listens through headphones. I stuck the plug at the other end of the cable into the computer jack and tried to record some Casio plinking. No sound came from the Casio speakers, as mentioned, but also no waveform showed up in the track on the computer screen, and indeed there was no sound when I played the track back. I repeated this but added some talking, and the talking DID show up in the track, so the mic in the laptop was still hot. Then this morning I watched the latest videos linked by happyrat and had that "Hey now!" feeling. Per the video's advice I right-clicked on my Windows speaker icon and went to the recording devices tab and disabled the Realtek high definition (ha!) audio microphone and enabled Realtek high definition audio stereo mix. Sadly, the results I got when recording a track were the same: laptop mic hot, no signal through the cable. I'll get back to this thread later this week if I have any breakthroughs. I may shop for happyrat's USB MIDI interface. May I presume that this is different from what people mean when they talk about an "external sound card"?

Alright, it will take me a while to absorb everything in that YT link from happyrat, but I'm working on it. And to Brad, I can say there is only one 1/8" jack in my laptop (which is not close to ten years old). It has a tiny symbol next to it that looks like headphones to me when I shine a flashlight on it with my Grandpa reading glasses on. But perhaps it can function as input or output--I haven't been able to tell by looking up my laptop model on the Net.

Okay, a thank-you to happyrat. I read those links on MIDI, and they will be of value to me in the future, I'm sure. But right now I think the answer is, "Cameron is doing something silly," as in Joe's idea that a microphone is hot. I put the software in Record mode and tried the following----- * Cable connecting Casio to computer, play notes and talk near the Casio. * Cable connecting Casio to computer, play notes and talk near laptop. * Cable NOT connected, play notes and talk near the Casio. * Cable NOT connected, play notes and talk near the laptop. Playing back those four methods tells me that the cable is not doing anything, and there is a live mic embedded in my laptop, but not one embedded in my Casio. So much for me thinking I was making my first use of MIDI. I'll get back to this thread when I learn how to kill the laptop mic and make the cable actually do something other than sit there and look pretty.

Hats off to those of you who put a thousand bucks or more into things Casio. At a warehouse store I made an impulse purchase of a more modest machine, the Casio 230R digital piano. After a few weeks of playing through my books of sheet music, I got the idea that it could be fun to listen to my ham-fisted playing while driving my car. To that end I bought the basic stripped-down version of Magix Music Studio software for ~ $40. It allows recording of tracks, mixing them, and mastering to a CD. I found that my HP printer cable had the correct ends to connect the back of the Casio to a USB port on my laptop computer on which I had installed Magix. I'll say what I expected to happen through this cable, and then what actually happened. I had read that a MIDI cable causes a keyboard to act as a switching device. So I figured the voice (aka "tone") that I set the Casio to would not matter. Instead of hearing reed organ, for instance, coming out of the Casio speakers, I would hear the software's virtual piano playing through the computer speakers. So I hooked up the cable and the software confirmed with a small text item that I was connected to a Casio. I noodled around on the Casio keyboard with the software set to record. I heard the usual sound coming from the Casio speakers, and did not notice any sound coming from the computer speakers. When I instructed the laptop to play back what I had recorded, I noticed these things-- i) The waveform shown in the track was low-amplitude compared to some "sound pool" samples off a Magix CD that I had been experimenting with. ii) Consistent with (i), the sound coming out of the computer speakers was quite low, though I had set the Casio volume wheel fairly high. iii) The voice I heard was in fact the Casio voice I had selected through the Casio's numeric keypad. iv) But the music track was not nearly as clean sounding as when it comes out of the Casio speakers. It was more like what you would hear on a telephone. "Dirty" or "distorted" might be adjectives to describe it. v) There was white noise (aka "static") in the track, which was especially noticeable in the silence between notes being played. vi) There was a thunk when I got to the end of the track, where I had used my mouse to hit the software's Stop button. Now item (iii) I consider a good thing, since I would be perfectly happy to mix several tracks of pure Casio voices for my CD tracks and ignore whatever voices the Magix software may contain. The other items... not so good. I read in the Magix instructions PDF that in MIDI mode one should set the electronic keyboard one is playing to "local off." I scoured my Casio 230R for such a switch, and did not see one. As a workaround, I may try to buy a cable that has a quarter-inch stereo plug at one end (since I think that one of the jacks on the back of the Casio puts out stereo sound) and an eighth-inch stereo plug at the other (in hopes that the only eighth-inch jack on my computer can function as stereo audio input in addition to being audio output for headphones). Are there any impedance issues that militate against doing this? My expectation is that having the plug inserted into that jack on the Casio is going to make the Casio speakers cut out, but maybe will allow me to monitor my recording live through the computer speakers. If both sets of speakers are silent with this hookup, I have an 1980s-vintage mixing board that I can probably hook up so as to give me headphone or speaker monitoring of my playing on the Casio while in Record mode in the software. Anybody been there and done that? Am I doing something silly, maybe? Any advice will be appreciated.