Korg Forums

[paulin]

For my daughters 13th birthday we got her a Kross and she has been playing on that thing composing something over the last month. So we've been trying figure out how to get the song off and turned into something we can put into our music collection. Anyway tonight she accidentally deleted.

Luck would have it I was afraid I would accidentally delete it so I had used the Kross Editor to download something. So I have a couple files saves and the Editor can load and see her song.

Anyway at this point we have no idea what to do. So the questions are simple.
1. How can I push the song in the editor back to the keyboard (we tried transfer all and we just get a error with no descriptive information)
2. How do we take a song and turn it into something we can get onto a computer and convert to something our iPods can play.
3. What is the point of the Editor as we can't find any good documentation

I have no music talent other then listening to music. Any help to hopefully lift my daughter's spirits would be appreciated.

Thanks,
steve

[Koekepan]

Disclaimer: I am NOT a guru, particularly not with the software, but I'll do my best to give advice.

First: my sympathies (and I'm sure most everyone here's) are with your daughter. Losing songs like that is terrible. So, I know it's hard to learn it this way, but you need to back up your SD cards. Fortunately, it's not hard to do, it's just a habit you need to form. Remind your daughter that she will have many beautiful songs in the future as well; she just paid the (very sad) price of an important lesson learned. What she lost yesterday, will prevent her losing tomorrow.

Second: by the way, your daughter is awesome. I am not quite sure why, but there are a lot of sausagefests in the world of composition. I hope that she will help break that pattern! (Anecdotally, I was told that in a composition course at a college, the guys were all trying to do EDM or orchestral composition, while the ladies were going for singer-songwriter stuff. I'm unsure of the ramifications.)

I am not quite sure what the Editor has there. Can you find the files? PCG and/or SNG files? If so, you can put those back on an SD card and load them manually by holding Exit and pushing Global/Media, then finding the files on the card and loading them. If the Editor can export a MIDI file, then you can also load that although she may have to fix up the tones and so on to get it all in line again.

As for taking a song and turning it into a file, the Kross actually makes this pretty easy.

A) get into your sequencer, with your song of choice loaded. If you like, hit play to make sure it sounds right. Does it sound right? We're cooking! OK, hit stop, then zip back to the beginning for the next step.

B) Under Audio Recorder, hit SETUP. That immediately tells your Kross that there shall be some recording action going on, and it should show you the interface. There are a few ways around, but I'll let you know how I set it up.

C) Highlight the song name (it should be by default), hit the FUNCTION button under the screen, and say Create a New Song. It will give you a chance to name it, and then set it all up.

D) Hit the right arrow, go to the Auto setting. Use the data wheel to change it to SEQ START. What this means is that, once everything's ready to go, it will start recording when you kick off the sequencer.

E) Hit the MENU button, under the record icon in the screen. This tells it to get ready, and the play/pause button under AUDIO RECORDING should be blinking now.

F) Hit the sequencer's PLAY button, and let it run. It will run, it will complete, then you can hit the STOP button for recording.

G) Assuming you're happy with what you have, you can use the FUNCTION button to do things like export the audio file as a single audio track. You should then have a .WAV file that you can copy from your SD card onto the computer of your choice, and iPod or whatever. I would, in the interests of efficiency, transcode it to, at least, .FLAC or possibly .OGG, but that's all you.

Hope this helps!

And if it's worth anything: I'm pulling for her! The road to art is full of pain and stumbles, but the secret is to get right back on the horse that threw you off, and keep riding!

Best wishes. Let us know if you have more questions.

[paulin]

Thanks for the reply. She is in much better spirits today and feels like she can fully recreate it. After about an hour in her room she called me up to help with levels and I think it turned out better then the original.

We did play with the software a little more and I got it to get passed the transmit error. Reinstalled and I guess that fixed it but we were having fun making the computer affect her playing. The part I'm still confused by is the software had her song but when we pushed it up it only had 4 beats so not sure. But it all worked out.

She just brought me the wav file so your instructions were spot on. A big thank you for that. She is very excited at the moment. So next step put it on her iPod which I think we have successfully done.

Thanks again and we'll see what else she creates now that we are past the first one.

steve

[Koekepan]

I am deeply glad to hear that, and delighted that I could help a young composer.

The computer is helpful, but honestly nine times out of ten the Kross by itself is all you need. Well, that, some batteries and a set of headphones.

Depending on which OS you use, there are a number of ways of transcoding .WAV files, and they are so large that you might as well do so, even if only to make an MP3 copy so as not to take up space on an iPod. Audacity will do that for you, quite nicely, and it's a free download.

Incidentally, I know that she already has the iPod, but if the time ever comes to replace it as a music player, may I recommend the Fiio X1? It's a nice little thing, and with a 128GB microSD card in it, it's a very flexible and useful tool for keeping your musical portfolio around to play for people. You can also copy the card to another card to back up your music collection - always useful!