Modern Floppy Disk Image Conversion: A Practical Guide

My first experiences with floppy disk image formats began when figuring out how to save old Yamaha floppy disks for use with a Nalbantov using a Greaseweazle. My goal was to find a clean repeatable way to image floppy disks and add floppy disk images to Nalbantov USBs in the proper formats. However, although Nalbantov’s … Read more

Floppy Disk Image Tool: Convert Between Formats or Extract Files

Whether your workflow revolves around a Gotek, a Nalbantov USB floppy disk emulator, or the full Greaseweazle toolkit, you’re in the right place! I built this online Floppy Disk Image Converter around Greaseweazle tools to take the friction out of disk-image wrangling—just upload almost any 3½-inch or 5¼-inch image, click once, and within seconds you’ll … Read more

Why Disklavier Floppy Drives Fail (And How to Back Up Disks)

Yamaha Disklavier floppy disk drives are a notorious point of failure. Yamaha Disklaviers used floppy disk drives that were quite excellent for their time: They had all-metal frames, precision stepper mechanisms, and reasonably tolerant analog read electronics. Thirty-odd years later, however, these mechanical drives are far past their life expectancies. If you have an older … Read more

Best USB Floppy Drives for Reading Yamaha Disklavier Floppy Disks

So you’ve decided to back up your Yamaha Disklavier floppy disks. And now you need a floppy disk drive that can read them! So what’s the best USB floppy disk drive for our purpose, and especially for reading those earlier, pesky 720 KB double-density (DD) variants used by early Disklaviers? This article explores various options, including … Read more

How to Use PSX (ESEQ Archive) Files for the Yamaha Disklavier

If you’ve downloaded music for a Disklavier Mark III or older model with a floppy drive, you might have downloaded a PSX file. If you have one of these files, hopefully this article can help you out! What Is a PSX File? For Yamaha MusicSoft, a PSX file is an archive format that contains the … Read more

Recording with the Nalbantov: The Truly Blank Disk!

In short, you probably want to download my blank virtual disk file for the Nalbantov or other emulators. These work on your Disklavier—specifically the Marks I and II—and on your computer. If you have an early Disklavier model like the DKC5R or DKC100R, you might have decided to install a Nalbantov floppy emulator in place … Read more

How to Properly Ship Floppy Disks: Tips & Guidance

Are you shipping floppy disks to me so that I can transfer them to modern media? Or perhaps you’re just shipping some floppy disks, and arrived at this article? In either case, I can provide some guidance! When shipping floppy disks, the most important objective is to package them securely to prevent damage during transit. … Read more

Yamaha Electone Performance Disks: Reading and Copying

A person recently contacted me attempting to copy their Yamaha Electone Performance Disks. These files are not visible on Windows: If you attempt to open the drive you’ll see “The disk in Drive A is not formatted.” This is typical of Yamaha’s proprietary ESEQ format, and does not necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with the … Read more