Getting data off of your Roland BR8 or VS zip drive
“Is there any way to play or transfer songs recorded on my Boss BR8 (100meg zip) disks to any other machine or computer? I would like to back up more than 2-3 songs to one storage media if possible. Plus I’d hate to find out after I have 200 songs on disk that when my machine breaks I can no longer play the recordings. Any clues?” You can copy the data to a Mac or PC. Actually the procedures outlined below will work with any of the Roland VS series recorders.To get it to a PC just put it the disk in any ZIP drive connected to your PC and copy it to the hard drive.To get it to a Mac, you will need Dos Mounter 95 and MultiMounter extensions. Disable any other kind of CD/Hard Drive/Zip/Jaz etc… Driver except Dos Mounter 95 and MultiMounter. (If you accidentally leave one on, the Mac will not mount (recognize) the Zip from the BR-8). Pop the BR-8 cartridge into the Zip drive on the Mac and drag the image to the hard drive.After you do this, on the PC or the Mac, you can then use a CD burner program to burn a CD of the disk images (not an audio CD, but a backup data CD).If you really want to get audio from the BR-8 that is playable by the computer the only way to do that is to upgrade to a VS-840GX and convert the disk to a .wav disk. Also, for what it’s worth, we’ve seen VERY few problems with any of Roland’s VS recorders (BR8 included). Your machine may outlast you!
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