clavinova Archives - Alex's Piano Service

I’m in the process of transferring files in a Yamaha CLP-156, a Clavinova from 1994, which uses an early version of ESEQ. I’ve been trying to figure out how to read these disks, and in my journeys, I encountered this Yamaha service note from 2004. They refer to a product called Giebler’s Yamaha DOM package, which is used for copying Clavinova and Disklavier files. I was curious to see if this different at all from the more modern tools I have available, and if it might have an edge reading older disks.

You can view the Yamaha DOM Package from Gary Giebler on the Giebler website. It’s a bit pricey — $54.95 at the time of this writing. But it’s a specialized tool, to say the least!

However, it requires an MS-DOS based version of Windows. I couldn’t get it to run in FreeDOS, as it required a Windows environment for the installation. I was able to get it running on Windows ME, running on physical hardware with an internal floppy disk drive. This is a very high bar to clear for installation — Windows ME and Windows 98SE are hard to install on modern hardware, to say the least, and Windows ME barely ran on the 2008 era computer I used for this process.

Finally, I got everything installed, and I got to the first screen. This software has the following options, and none are particularly helpful for our purposes:

The Yamaha Disk Manager control screen. (*Serial number and name are scrubbed from the status bar.*)

I tried a handful of disks with it. I found its performance at reading disks somewhat limited compared to modern tools like Mark Fontana’s Player Piano Floppy Backup Utility (PPFBU). But it was able to look at disks and list their contents, and it had a pleasant old-timey feel. See, for instance, a directory listing:

The directory listing for a Christmas album I used as a sample.

I attempted to make a copy of the disk, and was met with this error:

It’s easy enough to understand why this is, and certainly why this was over twenty years ago. But this means this software will almost never be the appropriate solution for backing up your floppy disks or moving them to modern hardware. It’s an interesting historical tool, and might be of assistance in some edge cases, but in general we have better tools today.