MIDI, SCSI, and Sample Dumps
SCSI Guidelines
6-3
K2661 and Macintosh Computers
There are several points to consider when using a Macintosh with the K2661:
1. The Mac is not well equipped for having another SCSI master on the bus (that is, the
K2661). It assumes that it owns the bus and its drives—consequently it will not allow the
K2661 to address any of its drives. Therefore, you should not attempt to read from or
write to 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 K2661 is doing anything via SCSI, you’ll have problems. The only solution is to wait
until your Mac is completely idle before accessing SCSI from the K2661.
2. The Mac and the K2661 cannot share a drive in any way, with or without partitions. If you
are using a removable-media drive (like a Syquest or Zip drive), you can’t easily use it for
both Mac-formatted disks and K2661-formatted disks. To prevent problems, you will need
to unmount the drive from the Mac desktop before using a K2661-formatted disk in the
drive. The Mac will basically ignore the disk if it’s not in Mac format, but once you insert a
Mac-formatted volume, the Mac owns it. Don’t forget: inserting a disk in a removable
drive will cause the Mac to access SCSI, so don’t try to use the K2661 at that moment.
3. The only good reason for connecting the Mac and the K2661 on the same SCSI bus is to
use Alchemy or the equivalent. If you’re using a patch editor or librarian, you can connect
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 K2661 have its own
drive, and the Mac have its own drive.
However, we have discovered that when using a K2661 with a Mac and a removable
media drive in the middle of the chain, the following scenario will work:
Start with a Mac-formatted disk in the drive. When you want to use the K2661, put the
drive to sleep from the K2661. You can then change to a K2661-formatted disk and
perform whatever disk operations you need. When you want to go back to the Mac, put
the drive to sleep again, switch disks, and then wake up the drive by pressing Load. Of
course the K2661 will tell you it can’t read the disk, but the Mac will be able to.
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