This is the FANTASTIC mdisk, provided by Craig Vanderborgh. Please read the readme below.. you MUST install the (FDinstall.exe) low-level floppy driver for it to work however. This allows mdisk to read/write to the floppy device directly, without Windows trying to interpret the calls, needed for the mirage disk layout. (a reboot in needed too) It's tiny and harmless, and.. bloody fast! -J France.

I have received two e-mails that there are viruses in FdInstall.exe and mdisk.exe. I did my homework and located the files from their source again. If you try them again and have no problem, please let me know. If you still see a virus warning, please also let me know. SRPL, 18 Jan, 2010

 Name                    Last modified       Size  Description

 FdInstall.exe           19-Jan-2010 00:13    17k  updated 18/01/10
 FdInstall_old.exe       02-Oct-2009 17:45   190k  supposedly has a virus?
 mdisk.exe               19-Jan-2010 00:13   616k  updated 18/01/10
 mdisk_old.exe           02-Oct-2009 17:46   790k  supposedly has a virus?

                             --- MDISK v0.5 ---

11/25/2006

mdisk is a small utility program that formats, reads, and writes disks for the

Ensoniq Mirage sampler.  It is currently operational only on the Win2k/XP 

platform, although it is written in portable C code that can be readily adapted

for other platforms.  We encourage everyone to use, share and develop mdisk.

LICENSE:

Permission to use mdisk in source or binary form is hereby granted to absolutely

everyone.  You can do anything you want with it, but you may not hold me 

responsible for the consequences!

USE ONLY SINGLE-SIDED 720K FLOPPIES:

Do not attempt to use mdisk with anything other than SINGLE-SIDED 720K floppies.

Other floppies may work, but they may not.

WARNING: Your Mirage floppy drive must be in good condition!!

Mirages are old.  If your Mirage drive is old and out of spec, you may not be able to 

read disks with your Mirage created by mdisk, or conversely mdisk may not be able

to read disks created on your Mirage.  

You may need to replace your Mirage floppy if you're having problems booting/reading

mdisk-created disks on your Mirage.  I had to replace mine.  Naturally, the same can 

also be said of your PC's floppy drive.  mdisk is useless without having floppy drives 

in both your PC and Mirage that are in good condition.

INSTALLATION:

1. Install the fdrawcmd.sys driver.  To do this, download the "FdInstall.exe"

installer and run this installer.

2. Copy the mdisk executable (mdisk.exe) to a location of your choice, and ensure that

it's in your path.  

When using mdisk, I strongly recommend using the Cygwin shell (www.cygwin.com) if 

you are not already doing so.

OPERATION:

mdisk can format, read, and write Mirage disk images.  mdisk is still under

development, but the basics do work reliably and are described here.  In what 

follows, "$" is the Cygwin shell prompt for Win2k/XP, but DOS "CMD" works also:

1. FORMATTING

Insert a SINGLE-SIDED disk into your PC's floppy drive.  Invoke mdisk to 

Mirage-format the disk as follows:

$ mdisk format

A few lines of debug printout will emit, the floppy drive will "clunk" for a short

time, and at the end of the formatting if all is successful you'll see

"returns 0".

NOTE: When formatting, mdisk does not put anything on the disk.  Never forget: you need

to put an *image* on the disk to use it.  Please read on!

2. CREATING A MASOS DISK

MASOS is copyrighted, so it's not possible to distribute it.  Don't ask me for it,

don't ask me where to get it.  You get it from Syntaur if you don't already have

it.  mdisk can extract a copy of the MASOS disk image (or any other 

Mirage disk) for your own personal use, which you can then use to create as many MASOS

disks as you want.  I recommend this approach to working with the Mirage:  I create

sounds only on MASOS disks, because there's no reason to make things more complicated

by having 2 kinds of Mirage disks around.

i.) Creating the disk image

This actually creates a dump on your PC of the entire disk image.  Insert your 

Ensoniq MASOS disk (or any other Mirage disk whose image you want to extract)

into your PC's floppy drive (a:) and run the following command:

$ mdisk dump -o masos

This invocation will create a dump file called "masos" on your PC in the

directory which mdisk is run.

ii.) Restoring the disk image

Once an image file is created, you can create other MASOS disks for your own

personal use by restoring the image dump.  Insert a Mirage-formatted disk into

your PC floppy drive (see above) and run this mdisk command:

$ mdisk restore -i masos

This mdisk invocation restores the image file "masos" to the Mirage-formatted

floppy in your PC's floppy drive.

NOTE: This dump/restore procedure works for ANY MIRAGE DISK, not just MASOS.

Thus, mdisk dump/restore provides a fantastic way to archive your sounds for

safekeeping and later reuse.

3. Exporting/Importing Sounds from .WAV

mdisk can export the contents a Mirage waveform and save the result as an 8-bit

.WAV file.  Going the other direction, mdisk can save an 8-bit .WAV file to the

Mirage disk.

First, recall that the Mirage has 3 sound banks, each containing an "upper" and a

"lower" sound.  The "lower" sound plays when the lower half of the keyboard is 

played, and the "upper" sound plays when the upper half is played.  mdisk uses the

following notation in commands to refer to the bank number/half for import/export

operations:

u - upper half

l - lower half

1, 2, or 3 - bank number

a.) Extracting Samples from a Mirage Disk to a .WAV file

To extract the "lower" sound from Bank 1 of a Mirage disk, the mdisk invocation

is as follows:

$ mdisk extract -t wav:l1 -o myfile.wav

Here's a brief description of the command line arguments.

First, the "extract" tells mdisk that we want to extract something from the Mirage

disk.  The "-t wav:l1" argument specifies WHAT we want to extract - a waveform.  

Within this, the "l1" refers to the LOWER sound from BANK 1.  Finally, the 

"-o myfile.wav" tells mdisk to OUTPUT (-o) the file "myfile.wav" as the result.

Similarly, to extract the UPPER sound from a Mirage disk, the mdisk invocation is:

$ mdisk extract -t wav:u1 -o myfile.wav

For emphasis - note that the "l" is replaced by "u".  For Banks 2 & 3, simply replace

the numeral "1" in "wav:u1" with 2 or 3 (i.e. "wav:u2" for Bank 2 or "wav:u3" for Bank3)

b.) Saving .WAV files to a Mirage disk:

NOTE:  The maximum number of bytes that that a Mirage sound can store is

64K.  If you try to save a .WAV file longer than this, mdisk will save only the

first 64 KB.

ANOTHER NOTE: Any .WAV you save to a Mirage disk needs to be 8-bit.  Use Wavelab

(or similar) to convert samples to 8-bit (e.g. from 16-bit) before trying to save

the .WAV to a Mirage disk.

The mdisk invocation for saving the .WAV file to the Mirage disk is similar to that

used for extraction.  To SAVE myfile.wav to the LOWER sound of Bank 1 on a Mirage

disk, do the following:

$ mdisk save -t wav:l1 -i myfile.wav

There are 2 big differences here from the extract invocation - first, the mdisk command

is "save" instead of "extract".  Second, the final part of the command line is

"-i myfile.wav".  The "-i" instructs mdisk to use myfile.wav as the INPUT for the

requested operation.

FINALLY:  Good luck.  You are one of the lucky few who understand just how

powerful, strange and wondrous the Mirage is.  May you use it well, and unleash

some wonderful new sounds in the process.

craig vanderborgh

the operation