I bought a Motif 8 in 2002 and worked through the DVD training a bit. The learning curve was, however, at that time too great and I left many unexplored possibilities behind--that is until recently.

I have discovered that in the meantime, the 3.3v Smart Media Cards that were to be used to store memory in the Motif 8 are no longer in production. And computers that are sold now do not relate to this kind of card so that I cannot sotre from card to computer

When I acquired the keyboard, I also bought a SCSI device (a Yamaha CDRW 2200 SX to be exact). I had bought it to load Akai samples to the keyboard. Unfortunately some of them would not load (many of the Big Fish Celtic Instruments, for example) and so I gave up on the device. But now that I am returning to my Motif education, I gather that this device should be able to store Waveforms, Patterns and such. But I was unable to save a disk or even format a rewritable disk for memory storage. I talked to one person at Yamaha and he said that I needed to format a CD to FAT32 first. I have tried this using “Run” “Format” in Windows and I have tried DOS commands. Then I looked online and am now convinced that CDRW disks cannot be formatted to File Allocation Transfer format.

I hear that some keyboards are using USB flash drives to store waveforms/patterns/songs. But this feature has developed since I bought my Motif. Can this feature be enabled in my Motif 8?

I kind of feel like this very expensive machine is, seven years after purchase, unusable. Any help?

Smart Media cards and a Smart Media card reader ( which allows you to connect your Smart Media card to your computer via USB) are both available in the Motif Mart.  Keyfax has gone out of their way to make sure that they find Smart Media cards for the original Motifs.

As for CD burning, most computers these days can format at burn CDs quicker than a SCSI connection.  We recommend trying to burn the CD on your computer in the correct format and using the CDRW for connecting to the Motif only.

We may eventually move this post to the Motif forums as other original Motif users maybe interested in the answers.

Hope that makes sense.

Hi ehoward.

This is the Motif XS forum. You’ll have better luck getting an answer to your question if you ask in the Motif classic forum, where most everyone is using equipment similar to you.

While I don’t think that those SmartMedia cards are being manufactured anymore, that doesn’t mean that they’re not available. So many were made that there must still be some web sites/other places that can sell you one. Either that, or you could buy one used.

The Motif classic couldn’t write CDs. You’ll need to either get a SmartMedia card from somewhere, or possibly get an external SCSI hard drive. To me, though, getting an external SCSI hard drive sounds much harder than finding a SmartMedia card.

Good luck, and try posting in the other forum for additional info.

>>> And computers that are sold now do not relate to this kind of card so that I cannot sotre from card to computer

NOT TRUE, for a few dollars you can buy an adapter to read/write SMC cards on any PC.

>>> and he said that I needed to format a CD to FAT32 first.

NOT TRUE, CD’s are never formatted but written on the fly.

>>> But this feature has developed since I bought my Motif. Can this feature be enabled in my Motif 8?

NO, you can not change the hardware. And there’s no need to.

>>> I kind of feel like this very expensive machine is, seven years after purchase, unusable.

That’s nonsense, this machine will work for you the next 20 years.
But you can not stop development of new periferals.
It’s better to say exactly what you want to do with music so we can advise you.

;JOOP!

Thanks for the info on Smart Media Cards. I’ll contact keyfax. About saving waveforms/patterns/songs to CD. I OWN an external CD rewritable SCSI drive, made by yamaha. Neither that drive nor my computer will physically format the disk such that is saves files from my keyboard. I’m still unclear about the CD thing. But I will post this to the other forum. I did not understand how to choose specific forums, this being my first post.

Download Imgburn from http://www.imgburn.com for the perfect CD and DVD maker.
It’s free!!

;JOOP!

Thanks again for the help. I’ll give it a try.
Evan