I didn't find much of use on the web when I did a search.
(There was one which was sold for only 60 Euros last year!)

The unit has occasionally reported disk errors in the past, but now it is failing on every disk, although reading part of them, enough to start playing the file and then stopping. So it MAY just be cleaning that is required.


Notes:
We only live 5 miles from the Roland UK offices, and dropped it in yesterday.

Roland confirmed that the controller chip could only handle 720k drives, and maybe only specific models at that. They didn't think it would be able to run an HD drive, even in DD mode, as the controller wouldn't recognise it.

Roland discontinued this unit several years ago, and do not market an alternative. It was basically the same technology as their MIDI keyboards, with sound module and floppy disk, but without the keyboard itself. Although technically very good, it wasn't understood by most singers. For example, they didn't realise that you could put a whole set (up to an hour or more) on one disk, in the right order, and therefore complained about a lot of disk changing being necessary.

I suppose there wasn't enough demand, and most singers seem to use MiniDisk nowadays. The advantage of using MIDI is that you can change the key or mute a single voice 'on the fly', even mid-tune. My wife is an Alto, which means that she rarely sings a song in the original key.

We did try an Italian unit last year, which has a HD or flash card (not sure which), and can hold many more songs, but although it worked, the sound quality was awful when compared with the Sound Canvas module (We had them side by side to compare). And it didn't have a MIDI out, so we couldn't just use it for the storage.

If Roland can't fix the problem, then we may resort to some of the posibilities mentioned above. It CAN format disks, I think, but unformatted DD disks are even rarer than formatted ones.

In the long term, I want to try driving the sound module directly from a laptop, via USB or Firewire interface to MIDI in, thus bypassing the floppy drive.