Player Piano: Pianodisc- iQ Intelligent Player System

[smccray]

Has anyone had any success integrating a player system into C4? My dealer is trying to trick C4 into working but we didn't have any success.

Link: http://www.pianodisc.com/products/details.aspx?id=55838

My system:

I have a piano in my living room which is the same room as my primary TV. Almost all of my equipment is centralized in a closet with IR control of the living room TV, living room receiver, and PS3 (using the toothfairy).

Objective:

The Pianodisc system uses a proprietary 2 channel audio track to play music on the piano. One channel controls the piano itself, with the second channel controlling music over a speaker. For example, elton john can "sing" in sync with the music being played on the piano. As you can see in the link above, the audio source in this case is an ipod with the music in .mp3 format. The goals are twofold:

- Play the singing over my living room speakers- should be easy

- Use C4 to play the mp3s so I can effectively control the piano on my living room TV- Appears to be the problem

Issue/Solution:

I purchased a wireless speaker point to try to make this work as I can't run wires to the piano, but we had some difficulty getting everything to work. I'm assured that the speaker point should work to input audio and transmit wirelessly back to the controller then back to my living room, but we haven't gotten it working yet no big deal here as this will just take a little time.

The bigger issue that it appears that the audio stream coming out of the speaker point isn't compatible with the audo stream requirements from the speaker point. Has anyone tried anything like what I'm describing?

Thanks in advance,

Scott

[Ethanaonyx]

Hi Scott,

I see your post is from a good few years ago, however we have just had a customer request to see if a Piano disk IQ Ipad based system can be integrated into C4. wanted to know if you were successful with this, and if you could offer any advise and guidance into how to wire up and configure on composer.

Kind Regards,

Ethan

[Nick L]

Hello,

I too have been struggling with this issue and found a solution!

Here is what I did.

Dedicated HC250 for Piano.

MIDI files on a USB.

Cable A - 3.5mm male stereo out to RCA male (L channel) and ¼" male (R channel). This cable feeds into 2 components, the L channel into an Amplifier (in my case I bought a Carver Amplifier) then onto the speaker (this is the "background music" portion of things) and the R channel feeds into a small Mixer board. At this point we are able to trim the two feeds independently and SEPARATE of each other, which is the key.

Cable B - 1/4" male Mono to 3.5mm male Stereo. This cable takes the mono MIDI signal from the Mixer board and feeds it into the Piano Disc iQ, then the iQ sends the MIDI over the ethernet cable to the keyboard.

We also have a C4 keypad with 4 "Piano Playlists" and a "Room Off" command.

Because the Mixer board has no auto-sensing ability, we installed a C4 outlet switch to turn on and off the Mixer, the Amp in this case does have auto sensing abilities so it works just fine.

Everything has been neatly hidden below, including the amp, it's why I bought it, and I made a very nice stand for the speaker out of black acrylic to finish the job.

We literally press a button and the piano plays, no apps, no nothing. Volume for the speaker is adjusted using the Vol up/down on the keypad (which actually varies the output level on the C$), because the amp we have does not have a remote. We bought this amp specifically because it fits below the Piano.

Hope this helps.

Nick