Upgrade your Pearl 2004 (and others) to USB - cheaply!

[s_mart]

How to use USB flash-drives (pen/ thumb-drives) with your Pearl Console. This was written for the Pearl 2004, but I don't see why this shouldn't work on others.

I do a fair amount of live club gigs, which mainly involves busking. Being fed up with the crappy Equipment in some of the clubs where I work, I'd been looking for a compact & affordable live-desk to buy. Since I live in Germany, I'm traditionally an MA-operator. But, I've always heard good things about the Pearl - so when I was recently offered one (the whole touring pack) really, really cheap - I couldn't resist. Sofar the desk doesn't offer much to criticise, except maybe the inability to store shapes in palettes and no USB!

ENTER THE USB FLOPPY EMULATOR
These sites also include free manual & software downloads:
www.ipcas.com/products/usb-floppy-emula ... o-udd.html
www.floppytousb.net/

These modules were all quite expensive, so I had a look on ebay & got mine for less than 30 Pounds (incl. shipping) out of Hong kong.

Hardware
First, make sure you buy the right model (1.44 MB) - there are 720 kB-only versions (& dual versions) available. (There are also emulators for SD-cards out there, but I haven't seen any modular ones - that would nicely fit into the Pearl.)
Just replace the floppy drive in your lighting desk - 4 screws, 1 data & 1 power cable. That's all!

Software
Use the PC-utility for Windows 2k/ XP (called SFD_V123) to format your pendrive. It creates (up to) 100 partitions (called blocks) - each simulating a virtual floppy disk.
This utility isn't very intuitive, but the manual tells you how - it worked fine on my Macbook with Parallels
& XP.
After formatting - you will need to mount each partition individually to copy data - so just repeat to install all 29 disks of the R20 fixture personality library!

BUT, before you waste the better part of an hour doing this - check if the Pearl actually recognizes your pendrive. As you might know, from audio collegues, that not all pendrives work on every sound desk!
Insert your pendrive into the Pearl to see if it reads & writes from/to your pendrive.
I had this problem - I couldn't store show-files to some of my different drives (Errors like: "can't open AVO.SYS" or "track 0 bad"), although loading fixtures always seemed to work.
Cheapo-brand "Platinum/ Bestmedia" + Verbatim (which I had lying around at home) is what worked best for me. The manual recommends using 1 GB drives, since it takes about 700 MB to emulate 100 Floppies.

IT WORKS - it might not be fast, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient than carrying 30 floppies around & it's very affordable...

[pbell283]

hey would this drive work ?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3-5In-144MB- ... SwKOJYHTej

now that computers dont come with floppy drives its a nightmare i am currently with a band who is using the pearl 2004 and getting personalitys onto it is a nightmare

also what software would work on windows 10 to format the pen properally also do i just download all of the personality disks and load them onto the pc or what was does that need done ?