Kurzweil K2500 - PERFORMANCE GUIDE REV F PART NUMBER 910252 CHAP 10 Manual page 3

If the K2500 is connected to a Macintosh or PC you should make sure that the computer
cannot access a SCSI disk at the same time the K2500 does (see below for more
information on this). Those who occasionally want to share a drive, but don't want to take
any risks would be best served by disconnecting and connecting devices as needed. If
you want to share drive(s) often and cannot constantly disconnect and reconnect devices,
make sure the Mac or PC is really done with the disk before using the K2500.
Furthermore, you should quit or exit from all running programs and disable screen
savers, email, network file sharing, and any INITs or TSR's that run in the background. If
the computer and K2500 access the disk at the same time there will be no damage to the
hardware, but the bits on the disk, K2500, and computer memory can easily be corrupted.
You may not know that damage has been done to these bits until weird things start to
happen for no apparent reason.
K2500 and Macintosh Computers
1. The Mac really does not like having another SCSI master on the bus (i.e., the K2500). It
assumes that it owns the bus and its drives, therefore it will not tolerate the situation
where the K2500 is trying to talk to its (the Mac's) disk. This suggests that you never want
to select the ID of any drive mounted on the Mac's desktop. Even more fundamental is the
problem that the Mac assumes that the bus is always free, so if it tries to do anything via
SCSI when the K2500 is doing anything via SCSI, the Mac will freak. The only solution is,
wait until your Mac is completely idle before accessing SCSI from the K2500.
2. The Mac and the K2500 cannot share a drive in any way, with or without partitions. If you
are using a drive with removable media, you cannot easily switch back and forth between
a Mac formatted volume and a K2500 formatted volume. To prevent problems, you will
need to unmount the drive from the Mac desktop before switching to a K2500 format
volume. The Mac will basically ignore the volume if it's not Mac format, but once you
insert a Mac format volume, the Mac owns it. Don't forget about #1 above; inserting a
cartridge will cause the Mac to access SCSI, so don't try to use the K2K at that moment.
3. The only good reason for connecting the Mac and the K2K on the same SCSI bus is to use
Alchemy or equivalent. If you're using a patch editor or librarian, you can just hook up via
MIDI. Connecting via SCSI will allow fast sample transfers through the SMDI protocol. In
this type of configuration the easiest solution is to let the K2K have its own drive, and the
Mac have it's own drive.
However, we have discovered that when using a K2500 with a Mac and a removable
media drive in the middle of the chain, the following scenario will work:
Start with a Mac formatted cartridge in the drive. When you want to use the K2500, put
the drive to sleep from the K2500. You can then change to a K2500 formatted cartridge and
perform whatever disk operations you need. When you want to go back to the Mac, put
the drive to sleep again, switch cartridges, and then wake up the disk by pressing Load .
Of course the K2500 will tell you it can't read the cart, but the Mac will now access it fine.
MIDI, SCSI, and Sample Dumps
SCSI Guidelines
10-3