pavane -

Even if a disk has been formatted, it can always be reformatted. Of course, when you reformat a disk, all the data on the disk is erased.

In order to read a disk accurately, the read head has to center on the tracks on the disk, and occasionally the arm that "reads" the disk gets misaligned slightly relative to the positioning mechanism. With a "standard" format, the track isn't quite under the head, and errors can result.

The disk itself is just a uniform coating of magnetic material. At least for a floppy drive, there are no "built in" tracks, so formatting, or reformatting, puts the tracks where the device that does the format thinks they should be.

If you re-format the disk in the machine that's going to read it the track (or at least the track markers) will be written so that it's aligned with the head, and sometimes you get a better read - even if the data is written with another drive that tracks a little differently. (Of course the best track alignment happens when the same device does both the read and the write on the disk.)

"Track drift" used to be something of a problem even on Hard Drives. The original track location, established by the format of the disk, could not be "corrected" without reformatting - and of course erasing all the data. If the alignment of the heads "drifted" the disk became unreliable. Any new "data bits" would align with the new head locations, but the track markers eventually might be somewhere else. Gibsons "SpinRite" program solved the problem for hard drives, by permitting a rewrite of the format markers without moving the data. Since a "new" write of the track markers would automatically be wherever the heads were, the disk was "saved" without resorting to a reformat and then restoring everything.

The problem doesn't seem to appear in newer Hard Drives, possibly because the track-to-track spacing has become so small that the makers have had to eliminate the problem to make them work at all.

Track alignment was always a problem with floppy disks, but was seldom noticed simply because most floppies were usually read by the same drive that wrote them. Exchanging data via floppy "sneaker net" between machines, though, could result in lots of read failures, especially with a little "age" on the drives. I can recall "mapping" the machines in the office to track which ones could/couldn't read floppies made by which other ones. To get stuff from machine A to machine B, you might have to go to machine C, which could read A's floppy, and rewrite the data on C so that B could read it, since B could read C but not A - etc.

Of course there are lots of other things that can go wrong with a floppy drive too, and Roland is in the best postition to tell you what can be done with your unit.

Assuming that you'd like to stick with the MIDI format, your least painful option might be to just get an up to date keyboard and put a dust cover over the keys. Quite a few of them that I've seen (without doing any real investigation) seem to have memory - floppy or card types - and MIDI in and MIDI out ports.

Most of the computer based MIDI setups let you change the "sample set" so I would suppose it might be remotely possible that you could put the Roland set on the Italian unit and get something closer to the sound you want(?).

The most "sophisticated" MIDI playback systems I've seen recently have been in a couple of church organs, so you might find something more like your present unit at one of the organ makers. Baldwin and Allen come to mind, but I haven't looked to see if either has anything like your present unit.

The PC solution does seem to have a lot to offer, if you can set it up to match your performance needs.

John