Are there any Korg DSS-1 users around? I wrote a very small utility program called DSSend that sends and retrieves systems over MIDI and saves them to files. A beta version is attached if you'd like to give it a try. (Sorry, Windows version only.) It does not support the DSM-1, only the DSS-1.
I had read that disk drives on the DSS-1 are susceptible to going bad. So just in case mine ever did fail I thought I'd write a program to grab all the data on the floppies and save it to hard disk. I've seen that there are a couple of older programs that let you create floppies from disk images, but I didn't see any that let you avoid the disk drive altogether and transfer over MIDI. So that's why I made this. It may be useful to anyone who has a DSS-1 with a broken floppy drive, or if you just want to backup or save without having to buy more blank floppies. I don't know how long my floppies will retain their magnetic personalities.
Yes, it's slower than loading from floppy disk. The Piano system A from factory Disk 1 takes about 195 seconds to send compared to about 45 seconds when loading from floppy. (Although the smallest systems like system C on the same Disk are actually faster over MIDI.) But it's better than nothing if your floppy drive is broken.
This utility is very basic and doesn't allow any sort of editing of systems. It only sends and retrieves entire systems. It maintains the idea of a "Disk" which is a collection of systems that share multisounds. But unlike a real floppy disk a DSSend "Disk" can contain more than four systems.
I'm calling this a beta version in case any there are any minor bugs found or any minor improvements needed. (Let me know.) To use DSSend, first setup the MIDI ports and channel using the MIDI menu. Make sure your MIDI connections are OK. Click the New button to begin a new blank disk. Then click the Receive button to retrieve the current system from the DSS-1. Once you have gotten all the systems you want from the DSS-1, click the SaveAs button to save all to a file (with extension .dssdsk). You can rename systems and disks. The arrow buttons let you reorder systems in the list.
I have about 57 factory disks I could eventually make available in DSSend format if I could find a place to put them online. There are more disks at
this DSS-1 site but I don't know the file formats of those files.