Does anyone have a setup and process for transferring an MC500 project disk to a midi file easily? ...or know of a service for hire?
 
Thanks -

Do you by chance have the MC500?

Yes - I sold my original, but recently found one on ebay. It appears the motherboard battery has died, so I need to purchase a system disk and load the system.

OK the system disc is very hard to find unless someone has got one on ebay etc but the good news is that Roland have it here:
 
http://www.roland.se/supp...ates/General_Apps.aspx
 
Here too I think:
 
http://www.roland-museum.de/synth/html/MC500/Roland_MC500_downloads.html
 
On the Roland site there are two things. The actual system disc file and a little program that allows you to make the system disc. Now I am not sure but it might have to be on a 720K floppy not sure about that. You will need a computer with a floppy drive of course. (What is that!)
 
I had an MC500 too but got rid of it recently but I was able to make the system disc Ok and the unit worked OK. You have to turn the unit on everytime with the system disc in the drive. The OS takes a while to load from the drive.
 
One the OS is loaded in you should be able to put your song disc in and load it up. I would do that and connect the MC500 to some synths etc or GM synth to make sure the music plays OK.
 
Then you will connect it to an available midi port connected to your computer. I guess you are using Sonar. You will have to put the MC500 into external sync mode and also transmit the midi clock out that port. This does not normally happen in Sonar and you have to instruct it to do this.
 
Then when you start Sonar the MC500 should start and stay in sync. Then you can transfer the sequence over and save it is a SMF.
 
Let me know is the system disc thing does not work. I remember finding it somewhere else as well as the Roland site.
 
The old Roland MC was quite a good sequencer. Make sure you make the right System disc too. because there was an MC500 MkII that might have had a different operating system.
 

I found a system disk on eBay. I'll try your instructions above and post the results. Thank you for your help!

I would go for the system disc on ebay if you can because it took me several attempts to make one that actually worked OK. I think there is something special about the actual Roland system disc itself.

Do the project disks open on a PC via a floppy drive?
I would think you could copy the MIDI files directly from the disks?
I managed to transfer all my old Atari MIDI disks this way.

Cactus Atari was cool in that it used a standard MS DOS disc format and you could load them up on a normal PC which was rather excellent. In fact thanks for reminding me because I have got some Atari files myself I would not mind transferring.
 
I think Roland MC500 had its own proprietary song format and the only way is maybe to open them up on an MC500. He does own one, he just needs to get the System Disc sorted which I am hoping he is doing right now. I managed to get one working again by making a System Disc.

Yes you just jogged my memory and if I'm correct it was SNG. file extention which I had a convertor for in the Atari. I used a Sound Canvas for a while and that might have been the same. 
To bad I tossed out all my Atari software disks, but there's a site called Tims Atari World with just about every possible software as freeware now...And I paid $400 for DrT's.KCS.
 
http://tamw.atari-users.net/
 
Possibly the conversion software can be found there???
 

I have an MC500 and use it all the time.    In response to the question about reading the disks on a computer:  No.   They are not DOS-formatted, nor Apple, nor Linux.    Besides, the songs in the MC are not stored in SMF format,  mainly because the drum tracks are stored as bar-length "patterns" that are repeated,  to save on runtime memory.     Memory chips were exorbitantly expensive in those days.  The advice on setting up sync, then playing your songs into the workstation is the best.    It has always worked well for me.   That of course expands the drum information from patterns into a whole track.  Aside: sending a sequence from a computer to the MC-500 (recording it on the MC-500) generally is a bit expensive in memory for the MC, because of the drum track.   It works, but uses a lot of memory at performance time...meaning fewer songs stored at once in memory, and more frequent loads from floppy.