Question Yamaha CLP-156 Floppy Disks

[sulphateiguana]

Hello everybody! Does anybody have experience copying files from old Yamaha Clavinova floppy disks?

I have this huge collection of CLP-156 disks that I absolutely can't read. After trying about 30 of them, I did find one where I can see a directory listing. I see…

CLP_01.MDA
CLP_02.MDA
CLP_03.MDA
CLP_04.MDA
CLP_05.MDA
CLP_06.MDA
CLP_07.MDA
CLP_08.MDA
MUSIC.DIR

It looks like some Bizzaroworld version of the ESEQ .FIL files with the PIANODIR.FIL. Maybe an earlier version of Yamaha's proprietary ESEQ format? That's my only real hint, along with the fact that the files, when opened in a text editor, have “COM-ESEQ” near the beginning of an otherwise apparently binary file.

Most of the disks appear as not formatted, although I'm told they all play in correctly in the now-defunct CLP-156. They appear to have been cared for excellently.

For transferring old floppies, I have a dual-boot MS-DOS / Windows XP machine with internal floppy disk drive, DKVUTILS, Player Piano Floppy Backup Utility (PPFBU), RootARipper, a Greaseweazle, and other niceties.

From here my plan is basically to find an old Clavinova with operating drive and feed these disks through it, reading the MIDI output and saving that on a computer. Which is awkward and weird, but probably functional. I'd love to be able to do something with these files.

 

[JohnBonhamsGhost]

Does anybody have experience copying files from old Yamaha Clavinova floppy disks?

contact Yamaha support directly and see if they have any OEM software available for Windows or Linux that can read these disks and convert to modern formats.

 

[fzabkar]

Are these service manuals of any use?

https://elektrotanya.com/showresult?what=Clavinova&kategoria=All&kat2=All

 

[sulphateiguana]

Most of the disks appear as not formatted, although I'm told they all play in correctly in the now-defunct CLP-156. They appear to have been cared for excellently.

So it turns out the problem is that the CLP-156 is old (1994), and formats the floppy disks as 2DD disks. In this case, the disks were actually 2HD disks, so the computer (correctly recognizing them as 2HD disks) thought they weren't formatted. Covering the shutters at the top right of the disk with electrical tape made them immediately readable on a computer.

The MDA files are, in fact, another form of ESEQ file. They can be converted to MIDI files using tools such as the DKVUTILS suite. The suite doesn't recognize the .MDA extension, but if you force it through the files through anyway, it works.

contact Yamaha support directly and see if they have any OEM software available for Windows or Linux that can read these disks and convert to modern formats.

Yamaha directly does not. They recommend a tool from Giebler, but this is a very old tool that only runs on MS-DOS based versions of Windows. That is, nothing newer than Windows ME. And even when I installed it on a suitable computer, this tool didn't identify the disks until I covered the shutter, as mentioned above. That really was the key step. It's clunky, and the DKVUTILS tools work better. The developer of PPFBU might expand the tool to include MDA files in the future.

Are these service manuals of any use?

https://elektrotanya.com/showresult?what=Clavinova&kategoria=All&kat2=All

Thank you for the recommendation! There's limited information about proprietary ESEQ files, or especially these MDA files in any of the manuals, whether user or service. The user manual does make it clear that you can save these as MIDI files from the keyboard itself, which would be a potential route. Fortunately, especially given the colossal inventory of disks, the above described route will be quicker!