Korg D1600 CF card mod Part II

Some time back I wrote a piece on my research and findings regarding using solid state flash card storage in my Korg multitrack studio recorder using a CF card to IDE adapter board. Click here if you want to read that entry. But why read ? Some long winded text on my thoughts on CF storage in such devices does not get that adapter neatly fixed into the machine !. That is what this piece is all about.

All you will need are a couple of screwdrivers, small saw, drill & 3mm bit, vile and a pair of pliers. Ow, and some measuring equipment.. I forgot to use some and it shows.

Mounting method
I chose to attach the board to the front panel rather then making a mounting bracket for the slot-in caddy. This has two advantages, firstly you do not need to align the bracket and the front panel and secondly it saves space in the caddy making it possible to consider future additions like adding a SSD hard-drive with a a select switch to choose CF card or internal drive.

Attaching the board this way means the IDE flat-cable and power cable coming out of the machine needs to not only be lengthy enough to reach to the connector but also to make the connection when assembling the front panel.

Now the big molex to small power connector adapter provided with the CF2IDE board made for enough length for easy assembly but the IDE ribbon in the caddy was really short so this had to be remedied.
This is of course no "biggy". With a salvaged IDE cable from some retired PC I found plenty of length for the job.

Modding the caddy

Nothing much has to be done to this piece. First the backside connector of the caddy needed disassembling. This is pretty straight forward and after replacing the cable and reassembling it, attach the power cable adapter and you are done here.

Modding the front panel

The original mock up. CF reader will be mounted lower

In a sudden outbreak of goodness towards all modding sound engineers, Korg thought it nice to make the front panel easily detachable. Just push down the two black bottom slide buttons that lock the thing into place and it comes right off to expose the caddy and the cd drive. The structural elements in this plastic piece make the modification rather easy.
I chose to bolt the PCB to the structural beam shown in the photo.
The PCB would sit neatly flush against the front of the panel locked down with two screws and nuts just about where the red lines are in the picture.

Now measure out where you want the card insert and eject button to be.
After you have marked them, use a drill to get more perforation in the plastic. Use a vile, knife or the drill to get at least 1 bigger whole through which you get fit a small metal saw blade.

>>> DO NOT START DRILLING OR CUTTING YET <<<
I make a rather stupid error in eyeballing the position of the board and this resulted in a very neatly integrated board and panel assembly. Alas I misjudged the clearance with the caddy in the bay and it turned out, it didn't fit ! I had to cut away another strut in the panel and move it some to make it work.
Since I already drilled holes I had to move it considerably leaving me with a unused gash to the right of the card slot. So measure your mod correctly to make it look nicer !
>>> DO NOT START DRILLING OR CUTTING YET <<<

Use the saw to neatly cut out a slot in which a vile can fit. Be sure to grind down to the structural bit where you will attach the board and not further. Try and make a neat square smooth finish with a fine vile.

Mark out the points where the screws go through the board and panel and drill them out. You are now ready to put the whole thing together. Probably the most fiddly bit is getting the nuts to properly find the screws but when that's done, you're solid!. 

Do make sure that when you mounted the board, it does not touch any metal part of the caddy when you insert it. Without the cables you can easily check this. If you think you are all right but want to be on the save side, insulate the metal bits near by.

 Putting it together

Only thing to do now it the trivial job of attaching the panel to the machine.
Put in the caddy and lock it with the original thumbscrews.
Make sure that the residual ribbon cable can easily fold in the caddy.



 

Line both parts up and attach the IDE and power cable.
Now gently press it home until it sits flush with the front of the machine.
Click the bottom clamps up and you are, as we say, Bacon buyer !.
Hook it up and test the mod. Seeing as it is rather simple, not a whole lot can go wrong.



If you wanted to get an extra drive in together with the adapter, perhaps using a shorter cable making your own custom length is advisable. For now this old piece will work just fine.

After thoughts

Apart from the small cock up failing to measure the clearance I'm pretty happy with the hack. Perhaps I'll make a sort of front bezel to fit over the butchered area but that is all cosmetics. What matters is the functionality is there.
Maybe the front bezel will have some sort of protection to make it harder to accidentally push the eject button when the machine is in operation.

The flash card when not fully inserted

Usually I like to make reversible hacks and this basically is apart from the big gaping hole in the front. Luckily It is not that apparent. I am glad that I did not try to mount it on the front as I mocked up earlier. Basically the machine is none the worse for wear.



I'll keep updating the blog with various findings I make from this little adventure, but i predict smooth sailing from now on.


Disclaimer : I can not be held responsible for people who, on basis of content of this blog, damage themselves of their machines.So if you forget to properly measure and cut out the wrong bit of your expensive equipment.. then you are probably me !.

A biography of Frida

As my profile description tells you, I dabble in archaeology a little and this means that, periodically, I have to travel to several "middles of nowheres" during regular office hours. Oddly enough most of these far-flung, secluded, inaccessible locations are pretty tricky to reach using only public transport, my favorite means of transportation. I could use a car, but that would require a driving license and several years of zen therapy or hypnosis to make me like driving. So a couple of years ago, I bought a folding bike. This is not a review, but more of a biography.

Back breaker ?

I make use of public transport, primarily the train, on almost a daily basis and had seen many a type of folding bicycle before getting mine. Some of the general design features always struck me as odd and/or clumsy.
Folding bikes are free to take with you on public transport, so lots of folding bikes are basically quasi normal sized bikes with a hinge in the middle. By definition these bikes "fold" but in reality they are transformed into a unstable v-shaped things of material that quickly clog up many a trains walkway. A normal bike is more practical in space saving terms, alas not money .
Other more size-conscious bike designers like Brompton make a cute little bike that folds up into …. a brick of iron which breaks the back when taking it aboard.

Finding Frida (Makes for a proper movie title, doesn't it ?)

All other bikes I encountered had some problem with it I felt. I understand that dealing with a smaller form factors and other needs demand compromise in some areas, but I felt the compromise in most folding bikes was terribly off balance. Be it stretching the definition of folding bike to breaking point, or creating a bike that is small enough to fit in your pocket, but could only be driven by durable bunny, most did not cut it for me.

Until this one day when I was traveling back home in a very busy train. I was stuck on the trains balcony with several other poor, sweaty, tired and perhaps grumpy people. Halfway a woman with a bike needed to get in. Arrrgg, I hate that, whenever somebody needs to get in a crowded train with a bike, ankles are going to get bruised, pants are going to get dirty, dispositions become measurably less sunny and the mood generally get somewhat more grim. But no, The woman and what seemed to be an… unicycle(do not try this) … hoped on, found a free spot between the sweaty people and all was well! After some of the people got off, making the balcony a bit more pleasant I asked her all about this strange looking bike. She told me it was a Strida and she even demonstrated the folding action on the balcony, mind you it was less crowded but not by much. Fast folding, elegant design, very light and pretty obscure, just my thing !.

Prythee

 I had done some research into folding bikes and I expected this particular bike to be on the pricy side of the spectrum. To my surprise this was not even close to being true. The version 5.1 back then generally cost 500 euros more then half what a boring Brompton costs. That settled it then.
I figured out who sold this thing and chose a reseller at walking distance from a train station I regularly passed. This would proof to be quite a strategic move.

I ordered the even more rare black powder coated version. and not before long I was cruising along on my space age folding bike. I had about a month before I really needed it for an excavation for which I wanted this alternate form of transport, so I needed to test it thoroughly of course.

Very quickly I found it a perfect companion for travel. It indeed was light, less then 10 kilograms and in fully folded mode I could fit underneath chains or even overhead in the trains storage compartment. The storage and space footprint of me and this bike was smaller then me and a backpack.
I perfected my folding action technique to the point where I could do the basic steps under 4 seconds and I developed a folding sequence which started while riding the bike and in one swooping fluid motion we transformed from riding a bike to walking with a futuristic cain without losing momentum.

In the time honoured tradition of antropomorphesizing various non living items, I named my bike Frida. This was because it is a "fiets", bike in dutch and it is a Stida. Fiets + Strida == Frida.

Living, working and playing with Frida

It turned out that Frida was quite the talk of the town, or rather the talk of the national railway service. Lots of useful time got wasting talking to a ton of strangers about the bike. A bit like I once asked a strange lady about her unicycle(do not  try this). It also turned out that there was a lot to talk about. The drive belt often was a hot item or the ceramic disk brakes on both wheels got a lot of attention.
People marveled at the simple but ingenious folding action, the excellent looks of the vehicle, the weight of it all.

But then everything went a bit pear shaped.
During the end of the excavation, on my way back, my drivebelt snapped in the middle of a crossing. It simply broke and I could see the metal strip that provides the supposed ruggedness that should ensure the kevlar belt would do up to 50.000 miles. Now I did use it quite intensively but surely I hadn't hit the 50.000 mile mark.
Having this failure in the middle of the week was particularly annoying as I could not get to a shop that sold these non standard kevlar belts. What was even more irritating was that the shop that sold me the bike did not have a spare on shelf. On the other side, the belt was, of course, replaced for me eventually without cost and I was told this had to be an fabricating error in the belt. Non the less I did buy a spare for any future episode.

Since then I wasn't all smooth sailing at all. I have had various breakdown and needed to replace parts or fix them.

A short selection of non-fatal breakdowns

• The tires wore out very fast. Not the stock tires had any profile on them to begin with, but the sides started to burst. Replacing the outer tires with more rugged wider better tracked tires costs the small amount of 30 euros. (Maximum fatality rate : Burst tire whilst crossing busy city street : 8.5)

• The magnetically ceramic pad wore out and FELL out of the caliper housing, instantly blocking my disk brake. If i was riding the thing at speed and the real or front wheel suddenly blocked, I'd be eating cobblestone. Replacing ceramic brake pads 5 euros per caliper and about 15 minutes.(Maximum fatality rate : When locking the tires solid when at speed on paved road :  6.7)

• The rubber mudflap on the read tire fell off somewhere making the rear tire fling muddy wet water up my spine whenever it had rained. This, in the Netherlands, is not the most unlikely scenario. Getting a non standard part and modifying it to fit and securing it with a bolt now, 4 euro's and and hour in the shed. (Maximum fatality rate : Complication due to cold caused by cold sludge water up your bum : 3.2)

• Somehow the brake cable for the rear brake got snagged somewhere, shearing off the small metal aglet at the end. This made the twisted metal unwind and makes the cable susceptible for kinks and bends which at one point make my brake work…. to enthusiastically. A damages unwounded bit of cable got stuck in the cable sleeve making breaking possible, but stopping the breaking action a bit more fiddly. This I fixed by rewinding the cable, making an aglet with some tin solder and un-denting the thing. (Maximum fatality rate :  Heart-attack or exhaustion cause by heavy peddle action due to break being stuck slightly : 5)

• One morning I was walking along with Frida in unicycle(do not try this) mode and I noticed she lagged on every rotation. I turned out that somehow the disk brake had suffered some trauma and the disk scuffed against the calliper housing making an irritating noise and causing friction a little. I park my bike outside the University a lot and perhaps some twat hit it with his bike. You never know at such places. I remedied that with bending the disk back using my chain lock.

• I also succeeded in dislocating the balljoint at the top of the frame. It is impossible to simple push this back by hand and I did not like the idea of jumping frantically in the frame in order to get it together again. Luckily I broke down in front of a hardware shop so I went in and bough me a nice crank clamp normally used for glueing things together. This baby poped that sucker back into with ease ! (Maximum fatality rate : Being impaled by either frame-ends at high speed : 9.7)

• Now this has not happened yet, But I predict it will. The Luggage rack is made of very flimsy plastic. It can only hold about 5KG and when folded the bike leans on this part. Now someday not very far from now, some (sleep)drunk student (perhaps the one that bend my brake disc) will stumble, fall and land on Frida and snap goes the luggage rack. The same probably goes for the big plastic gearwheel. which needs only 1 neatly delivered kick, and that would probably render it non functional. These items are available in aluminum and I am even thinking of getting these in advance, not waiting for my bike to be unusable for a number of days while I wait for the parts. Both items are 30 euro's a pop. (Maximum fatality rate : Death due to utter annoyance : 2.1)

Several upgrades are available, some for bling but some with real functionality and comfort encasing value. I'd like the bend handlebars that give about 10cm more clearance between knees and hands. At 30 bucks this is reasonable seeing as the kit comes with new breaking cables which obviously need to replace the old ones on account of length.

Mmm Upgrades !

Tending to Frida's fragile health

You might say that I moan and complain quite a lot about my little Frida. Why not put it on Ebay then and get rid of it ? But I do not want to get rid of it. I think It is a great little bike and an amazing design. The 500 euros I shilled out for it are, as to be expected, well spend. What I got was great value for money, mind you to the sum of 500 euros, which means that on such a product inferior components will be used.

It must be due to some scumm manager type that wanted to push the product in the market so aggressively that the quality suffered like it has. With all the new parts I would like or have already bought I perhaps spend  650 Euros and many an hour on the bike. Well, let me tell that manager tosser If the bike was 700 Euros with the proper components I would have bought it anyway. Probably most Stida users would have no problem with spending perhaps 800 or more on what remains a very functional and good concept.

Luckily I do not mind tinkering with tools and stuff, so my weekly or monthly hour of maintenance for Frida does not bother me the slightest. I normally took care of my other bikes too, albeit not that often as is required with Frida, and I find it to be fun.

I might create a section on the blog describing certain procedures in mending and upgrading a Strida called Pimp-My-Strida. Ow no, lets not do that. Although I can peddle my bike pretty quickly, I do not think I can outrun a legion of litigious Empty V (MTV) lawyers trying to sue me for brand-name infringements.

Most maintenance jobs you can do fairly easily just using the provided T-shaped In-bus key provided with the bike located under the seat and I won't be talking about those trivialities.

Conclusion

For now I'll just provide, what I think every buyer should do from the get-go when getting a Strida.

1. Get a spare belt
2. Get the anodized aluminum cogwheel
3. Get the bended steering bars
4. Replace the flimsy tires with better wider one immediately
5. Get the Aluminum luggage rack and replace the reflector with a standard rear light on batteries
6. Get at least 1 set of ceramic break pads for both wheels
7. Bolt down the rear mudflap with a nut and screw

Sooner or later you will have to do several of these anyway. If you do not like tinkering, spend the extra dough !

All other features you can get are pure luxury, but these are more or less essential. They also do up the price quite significantly, but you'll still end up with proper value for money far below the price of a Brompton or other A-class bikes and a far more practical bike then almost all other hinge based monstrosities.

See the 650(ish) euro version as the Stida as the Inventor meant it to be before some pencil neck manager type stuck his ugly nose into the business and fitted it out with sub standard rubbish to lower the price. There is a reason why a Brompton costs a whopping 1300 euros you know! You could drive of a cliff with that thing and the bike would come out relatively unscathed. There is quality engineering in that bike (it just looks and operates rubbish). 

I'm still pretty content with the freedom I have with this nifty little bike despite all the breakdowns, so I'll happily continue using it until the frame snaps or something lethal of more catastrophic happens.

Almost a Unicycle(Do not try this)

Disclaimer : I can not be held responsible for any damage or injury to real people or anthropomorphized folding bikes cause by action taken on account of content presented on this blog. Even, and this must to absolutely clear, even if you do fall down a cliff with your Brompton.

Korg D1600 CF card mod Part I

The Korg D1600 MKII

When the drive in my loyal Korg D1600 multitrack recorder decided to throw in the towel, I needed a new media device in my console and that got me thinking about alternatives.

The Korg D1600 is a neat piece of kit, around which my home studio and media projects are centered, which can record 6 to 8 track simultaneously depending on bitrate which a total of 12 to 16 track respectively.

I made project backups on cd's for projects that where important and often did not keep the track on the machine itself. That also made the death of the hard-disk itself a less traumatic event.

The interface for the Korg is an old-school IDE interface mounted on a bracket that slots in and connects through a big Centronic like connection. It is accessible right at the front of the machine when you take off the plastic cover.
I immediately replaced the drive with another 40GB drive, but found it to be to noisy. This could become somewhat of a nuisance, finding a proper IDE drive that runs silently enough. I really need a silent drive because the recorder resides in the room where the recording is going on, and several mic's are perfectly able to pick up subtle noises like that.
Luckily I found an old 80GB drive that ran pretty silent and I put that one it.

But It still bothered me a little. I do not like the concept of the spinning platter media carrier very much, never had really. And here I was in the age of solid state fitting my coveted machine with an old junky disk with objectionable operational methods.
I know about SSD and that these disks are available with an IDE interface in a 2.5" and 3.5" housing format and the idea to put one of these babies in is still quite tempting. Now the expense of a nice 32 or 64GB is not really the issue. I do not lose or gain that much compared to the 40GB drive and it is solid state.
Still these devices to break. Not a lot and not as enthusiastically as those supersonic spinning pieces of 80's memorabilia do, but still.
So I'd still be forced to do my CD backup overtimes I finished a project.
But really, how reliable are polycarbonate media for backup ? The figures are not that good. I keep them in proper conditions, no light, no humidity and still they are not to be trusted. On top on that, those mirror discs are just another spinning moving old fashioned type of storage. WHY CAN'T WE GET RID OF THOSE !?!?!?.
I find it rather vulgar to upgrade a nice machine with a state of the art drive, only to still be left a 100% reliant on spinning media backups.
But lets ignore backup procedure for a moment.


Finding alternatives

Maxtor Fireball III

Now I own the MKII version of this particular type of recorder unit and this model shipped with a whopping 40GB silent Maxtor fireball 3 disk. Now I did quite a lot of maintenance on that machine regarding deleting songs and even tracks that where obsoleted and during the 4 or 5 years of using the machine, I never really reached a point where the drive was used to the extent that it could be considered full.
So the question becomes : Do I really need a classic-moving-parts disk with months and months of storage space ?

The answer was "NO". It would be ideal if could use a solid state medium that I could use as a per project basis and not a one big clunky device with all the disadvantages of a fixed drive, be it solid or traditional.

In keeping up with what the industry is up to, I knew of several digital audio recorders that had flash card based solutions. Some of them take CF memory or memory sticks. So why can't I have that ? Why can't I have a nice D1600 - 16 channel multitrack that accepts a little solid state card per project, session or theme ?

So I set out to do some research on what I would need to hack my D1600 a little for it to accept some type of portable flash media.
I started out with finding out what adapters were available and more specifically available to me from my location to connect any type of memory card directly to an IDE bus.

It was pretty clear immediately that a myriad of boards are made to suite such purposes. It ranged from 3"5 card readers with multiple media slots to very simple single media interface boards used as internal components.

In the end I decided that compact flash was the best choice for this project since these cards are practically close family to the IDE standard. Some CF cards also support DMA and the high end cards have pretty nifty read/write speeds.
But my bet was that Ultra II cards would be decently fast enough to cope with 8 track simultaneous recoding or 16 track playback.


I decided against other form-factors because most of them had some logic on the board to make the IDE connection. This means that the speed is depended on these onboard components and seeing how these boards are not all that expensive, I figured that this could be a risk. I also wondered how much more IDE protocol compatible a third party adapter chip would be compared to Compact flash itself. If even small stuff like master/slave settings or other protocol features where badly implemented in such cheap components, the board could fail entirely in the D1600.
I also had several CF cards in various pieces of gear around the house!.

Now this might be the time at which you would protest and say the difference between a common hard-dirive and compact flash is more then just the bus interface and you'd be right. Both SSD's and ordinary disks have a certain amount of insanely fast cache memory to speed up operation and I'm not sure on how a CF flash card gets around such problems.
The dead disk I pulled out of the console, however, wasn't some high speed monster drive. It was a 5400RPM single platter disk with only 2MB of cache obviously build for price and silence, not speed.
The Read/write numbers on that disk where not that impressive and in real world examples quite similar or worst then the solid state CF cards I checked out.
Combined with the fact that multitrack recording is a lot of steady sequential reading and writing and that the disk had only this single purpose, I felt confident.

The adapter

As I would like easily removable storage for my console I chose a single card interface board with a nice ejection button for clean removal of the card.
This board also had a DMA jumper, a Master/Slave Jumper, 2 IDE ribbon cable connectors(40 and 44 pin) and a small molex connector when using the 40 pin ribbon connector.
This was great, because it would fail completely, I'd at least have this little part which I could use in a multitude of scenarios. With shipping it cost me about 22 Euro's so this even did not break the bank.

So I took out my 4GB Sandisk CF flash ultra II card from my Eos 350 and flung it and the adapter into the multitrack caddy, jammed it in and turned it on.
The device correctly recognized it and initialization was a breeze.
So now I had my device with a solid state drive running, what appeared to be, fine! But did it ?

All the parts thrown together in the caddy

Time for some testing. How did my new fangled non moving media device perform ? To be short, I did not notice any difference from the old hard-drive media.
I tried to do the most I/O intensive operations on such a short notice.
Recording 8 track simultaneously, and recording 8 and playing back 8 track and various overdubbing setups using a multitude of channels.
I also did a lot of short copy paste actions and recorded a lot of short bits on top of prerecorded tracks. In short I tried to fragment the drive as much as possible to get it to lag or fail but it did not.
I have a bit more of rigorous testing to do before the jury is in on this one, but I'm pretty sure that a single CF card is sturdy enough to handle the data i/o for a single project and then some.
Also do not forget that I only used Ultra II for this test not the more spiffy Extreme Ultra III type that would run circles round most common hard disks with ease.

As for recording space, the 4GB card had about 400 minutes of recording space, or so the indicator told me. This is, of course, per track would mean 25 minutes using all 16 tracks simultaneously. Now this is plenty for most band or other projects seeing as I never do more then 2 or 3 tracks per session. Even If I needed all the channels for all tracks then 8 Minutes per track would still fit nicely.

Results

Does this mean that a 8GB CF card would double the storage to 800 minutes ? Well, I'm not sure. The D1600 and other Korg hard-disk based recorders allocate about 2 gig's for USB transfer so I imagine when the CF card is initialized this is also done. I do not really like this system and use it rarely, but it's there and I do not know if it is possible to disable it.
This means my 4GB card possibly only yields 2GB of true recording storage but A 8 GB card would triple this number giving a rather decent 75 minutes of 16 track recording. Could I life with that ? I think I can !

The 16 32 and 64 GB flash cards are still a bit on the pricy side, but 30 Euro's for the 8 GB (15mbps) version of my 4GB card is doable. The 4GB version now roughly is 20 Euro's. The 16GB version goes for about 70 euro's and claims 30mbps as transfer speed.
The sweet spot for these types of memory lies around the 8 - 16 gig mark at the moment and I might get a couple of 4 8 and 16GB cards for various uses.

A small number of these media cards would quickly make me have a handsomely larger amount or media storage then my old fixed disk. All this for the cost not ridiculously higher then buying another disk, especially it it would be an SSD.

But what is the gain of this method you might ask ? I could all be down to personal preference, but I really like the possibility of have dedicated flash storage.
I will still back up finished projects to CD, but the CD is now practically a secondary backup. A flash card can lie on the cupboard for ages, and I can have 1 for every project or a small series of recordings.
So even If my primary storage fails, not all of it will do so at the same time.

Odds and ends

Apart from more rigorous testing, I still want to find out if the D1600 allocates 2GB on every drive it initializes. I tried to get some information from the disk with various partition analysis tools, but the proprietary format used by Korg remains illusive.








To be continued

Next time I hope to post the results and findings on hacking the D1600 to neatly accept the card in a front facing slot. I'm playing with the thought or leaving space for an extra internal SSD in the future which could be toggled with a tumbler switch or something.

Mock up of the CF card reader implementation

Disclaimer : I am in no way responsible for any damage that may be caused to equipment or people due to actions taken by others based on the content of this site. So don't come crying if you demolish your machine or break your finger on account of you being a clumsy tool !.