I'm sure many of you are aware that I have a Yamaha AR80 organ and have been running a Forum for AR organs for about 25 years .. the AR Group. It was because of this that Mike Bracchi was happy for me to help with the Admin of his Forum (ie.TDP) when he was running it, and when Mike moved on to run his Vintage Organ Group on Facebook, I had got so involved with TDP I took the opportunity of taking it over and running it. I have Dennis (from Australia) helping me .. and that is where we are now.

I have a friend who lives in Wales (Kathryn Holley) who also has an AR80 organ and she has contributed many, many of her recordings to the AR Group for Members to listen to .. in the form of floppy disk recordings! (Those of you who had Tyros 1, 2 or 3 will remember floppy disks!) Unfortunately, she can't join the AR Group or join our Forum either as she has no computer and no internet access! She plays the organ in her local Church, and plays in her local Community Hall for Line Dancing .. but of course hasn't bee able to do a lot of this because of Covid restrictions. So she decided this year to record some Christmas numbers to a CD and has sent me a copy. I have converted the tracks to MP3 and put them up in the AR Group Forum for their Members to listen to. If any of you would like to pop over and listen to it, here is the LINK that will take you there.

Do a right-click to open this up in a New Tab.
http://www.ar-group.org/smforum/index.php?topic=3851.0

When I listened to it I think I only knew seven of the tracks!

Hugh

Hi there Kathryn,
A very nice performance and selection of Christmas numbers well played I am still working my way through them all nice to hear the organ played my friend I am enjoying my listen.

Jon D.

Thanks for the comment Jon D. I have a second CD of hers that I shall be putting up shortly.

I will ring Kathryn and read out your comments to her. With her not having internet access (and she doesn't have a mobile either) I can't even send her an email!

Hugh

Hi Hugh. Like Jon I am making my way through them. So far I am enjoying my listen with some great sounds and styles. John

Hi Hugh,

Always nice to hear an organ played well, as is the case here, some real nice tunes amongst them, thanks for posting

All the best, Brian007

When I opened the parcel Kathryn sent me there were two CDs in it! So I have put the second one up as well.

The LINK specifically to the second CD is below. When you get there, scrolling up will take you to the first CD.

Do a right-click to open this up in a New Tab.
http://www.ar-group.org/smforum/index.php?topic=3851.msg14509#msg14509

Don't listen to them all at once or you'll still be listening by the time we get to next Christmas!

Hugh

Hi! Hugh. Great recordings. Good to listen to. As you know I like to know the ins and outs of everything. So, as she sent you a CD I wondered how she managed to record it. Does the AR have some facility to do that? What type of files did you convert to MP3 ?. Ken S.

Ken,

The only way the AR can record directly within the organ is to a floppy disk. Knowing that a CD holds 700MB, when I bought my organ I just wondered how much of a song you could get on a floppy, which is 1.44MB. And the answer is a whole CDs worth. This is because the floppy is a DATA disk, not an AUDIO disk. In other words, when you hear eg. a Saxophone being played from the floppy disk there is no information about the saxophone sound actually on the disk. The floppy disk sends a message to the organ saying, "Right, we want to hear this particular saxophone now" and it is the software in the organ that generates the sound we hear. So you can't 'play' the floppy on a computer as the computer doesn't have the AR's sound generators in it.

Basically, Kathryn has to record from the LINE OUT under her organ, which of course she could do 'live' as she is playing. But only having one pair of hands she first records to the floppy disk in the organ; then she plays that back and has two hands free to do the recording from the LINE OUT.

This is how I do it on my AR80 organ. I take leads from the LINE OUT under my organ (RCA plugs, or PHONO plugs as they are sometimes called) ..



.. and plug the other end into an Audio Interface,
This is the one I have.

The Behringer UCA202



The purpose of this (as you can see from the picture) is that the output from it is a USB .. which I plug into my laptop. I have downloaded Audacity onto my laptop and that picks up the STEREO input from the USB port. I then record to WAV files and put them onto a CD,

Kathryn has a laptop too, but as she is not a computer person, she got an engineer from her local computer shop to come to her house (this was in the days before Covid!) and he downloaded a program to put that STEREO signal from the Audio Interface directly onto a CD in the CD/DVD Drive of her laptop. And he set all the volumes up etc. So all she has to do is to switch everything on, start the CD recorder recording and play her songs from the floppy disk.

How do you record your music from your EL700 organ?

To answer your second question, Kathryn's CD files all end in .cda.

The CDA file extension is a data format known as CD Audio Track Shortcut. CDA files are small (44 bytes) virtual file created by Microsoft Windows CD driver for each track on an audio CD. They contain indexing information such as track times plus a special Windows shortcut that allows users to access the specific audio tracks. They do not contain music, instead point to where the music is located on the CD. These files instruct the computer which audio track to play on a CD. CDA files will not play when separated from the CD they represent. Converting CDA files is called ripping, which is copying music from a CD onto a computer. These files can be converted to WAV, MP3 etc.

You can do this using Windows Media Player, but I have a program from NCH Software called SWITCH for doing this. I highlight all the .cda tacks on the CD, choose .mp3 as the format to convert to, give SWITCH a Folder Name to put the files into, click Convert .. and in a couple of minutes all the MP3 tracks are in the folder ready for me to upload into BOX.

Hugh

Hi! Hugh

I record to floppy and then load through the PC to Audacity. regards Ken

Hello Kathryn, Have listened to some of the tracks. Love the organ voices especially Silver Bells. Regards, Den.

Jon D, JohnT, Brian007, Kens, Den ...

Thank you for your comments. I have read them to Kathryn over the phone and she is thrilled to bits that people are listening to her music. I try to tell her what she is missing out on by not having internet access. There is so much of interest both on this Forum and elsewhere on the internet for a musician. She couldn't even listen to my two youngsters playing the Steirische Harmonika ...



...or the "Angels from the Realms of Glory" I put up.



She would have loved listening to both of those.

She doesn't even have a mobile phone to do it. I know the internet can be a terrible and demoralising place to be, but it's up to us how we use it.

Hugh