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by Joe Waters
Connecting the SmartMedia Card to Your PC
In an earlier lessons, we discussed flash memory and, in particular
the SmartMedia Card as well as the CompactFlash card. If you've
purchased a SmartMedia card, you can just put it into your PSR-3000
and you're ready go. You can save any of the songs you are creating
on that card. You can make your own version of the Music Finder
database and save it to the card. You can fine-tune styles to your
liking and save them to the card. You can adjust the voices and
save your own versions of the voices to the card. You can create
registration files to set up the keyboard just the way you want
and save them to the card. You can rename or delete any of these
files, you can create (or erase) folders, you can copy files from
one folder to another. You can do all of these things, but you can
not move files from your PC to the PSR.
SmartMedia Card Reader/Writer
To transfer data from your PC to the PSR, you need to be able to
copy files from the PC to the SmartMedia card. Your PC, most likely,
does not have a card reader for the SmartMedia card. So, how are
you going to do it? Well, you will be happy to know that you can
purchase a device that will read information from a SmartMedia card
and then transfer the information to your PC. To do this, the device
has to be connected to your PC and your PC has to know how to talk
to it. That's where USB is so critical. You can buy a USB SmartMedia
Card Reader/Writer that can connect to the USB port on your PC.
The PC will recognize the device and add it as another "drive"
on your desktop. And once there, you simply drag whatever files
you want to transfer from the card to your hard drive (or floppy
disk) on the PC. If you already own a SmartMedia card for your camera,
you may have already copied the pictures from your digital camera
to your PC using a card reader.
Pictured here is the SanDisk SmartMedia Card Reader/Writer. You
can also buy a device that is only a card reader. You do
not want that. You want a card reader/writer because you also
want to copy items from your PC onto this card. You would copy them
to the USB card just the way you would copy files from your hard
drive to your floppy disk. Of course, the copy process will go much
faster and you will be able to store many more files than a floppy
disk would hold. I purchased the SanDisk card reader/writer, which
came with a separate USB cable to connect the card reader to the
PC. I could simply leave the card reader/writer attached to my PC
and move the SmartMedia card back and forth from the PSR to the
PC whenever I wanted to move data between the PSR and the PC. (In
practice, I am not using the SmartMedia card in this fashion as
you'll see as you read more about flash storage devices.) You should
be able to find card readers like this for $20 or less.
Multiple Device Reader/Writer
Just as there are quite a few manufacturers of SmartMedia cards,
there are quite a few manufacturers of SmartMedia Card Reader/Writers.
You will have no trouble finding options on the Internet. But SmartMedia
is not the latest flash card to be introduced.  There
are many competitive kinds of cards, such as the CompactFlash mentioned
in the earlier lesson and the Sony Memory Stick. Most digital cameras
only accept one type of flash card. Buy a different camera and you
may have to buy a whole different set of flash cards for your new
camera. To help consumers, there are card reader/writers on the
market that can read a variety of different flash cards. Pictured
here is the SanDisk 8 in 1 USB 2.0 Card Reader/Writer. This device
has four slots that allow it to handle 8 different card formats:
CompactFlash, CompactFlash II, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, SmartMedia,
xD-PictureCard, SD, and MultiMediaCard. This device will read (and
write) to your SmartMedia card, but it can also handle other kinds
of cards. If you plug this device into the back of your PSR, you
do not have to restrict yourself to SmartMedia cards. You could
take advantage of sale prices on another type of card and use that
in your PSR via this multi-card reader. If you were to have a SmartMedia
card and a CompactFlash card in the reader, the PSR would recognize
one as USB1 and the other as USB2, so the multi-card reader can
serve a function similar to that of a USB hub. The street price
for this model is between $30 and $40.
The Muli-device frees you up from having to rely on only a SmartMedia
card for storage in your PSR. But, as mentioned earlier, that USB
port gives you even more options. There are flash memory removable
drives that can be connected to your PSR and these may be an even
more convenient device for transferring data to and from your PC.
The next lesson will discuss removable flash drives.
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