The memory is not enough....my montage is full. I have 5 library from easy sounds, bosendorfer and American grand.. I can't mount mark V. I'm waiting for montage 2 with 5 Gb memory

This is very much like saying (forgive my levity...) but my van is full, I'm doing a gig and once I've loaded my Bosendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, and my Steinway D, plus all my other instruments, the Rhodes doesn't fit!

More, we all understand the desire for more. Eventually, memory will decrease in price... and since there are price points higher than the current Montage, all it will take is more money. We started with user customizable memory back in the early '90's when 512KB of memory storage cost $400. No, that's not a misprint 512 kilobytes cost $400... SY99...

Having a choice between a Yamaha CFX, CFIIIS, S700, and S6 (in ROM), a Bosendorfer 290 Imperial, a Steinway D (American Grand) in your Library, should be a dream for most Keyboard players. And without getting all boastful, but arguably you have a collection of acoustic emulation options to compete with any other manufacturer's current offerings, period.

They all are excellent recreations, any of them could be put up against any offering from any other manufacturer... and whether or not all of them or none of them are your particular favorite, they will all absolutely be in the conversation.

Just some perspective. Most companies give you a single acoustic (hope you like it)... you have a selection to be envied, enjoy it. The glass is half full, even if your memory is currently maxed out!

,,, as well as the Yamaha LU201c upright from the MIDI Pirates Pop Upright set on YamahaMusicSoft.com

Thanks, Jason, for your help! It worked. One last postscript: I initialized the keyboard with much fear and trepidation, but of course made a backup file as well as a user file. Then I loaded each piano library, and imported only the piano I wanted. I made a library file from that and initialized the user area. I did that with the Bösendorfer as well as the American Grand. I then loaded those individual libraries, followed by Chick's Mark V, and I was able to also load the Phat Analog 2. I still have about 300 M to spare, but it won't let me load anything else. It took probably about 4 hours (I left the machine during initializations). But at least I have my libraries back. I think I'll stop whining and just be grateful lest Yamaha strike me with something worse.:) I still would like to know why this happened in the first place. I don't have any (audio) songs or other wave files loaded.

When it comes to the Chick's Mark V or American Grand or Bosendorfer - just selecting one performance out of the bunch isn't going to save you much (or likely any) memory.

The only way it would is if the performance you happen to pick - for whatever reason - uses less velocity layers than the other performances.

The way most of these piano libraries are constructed is that each performance "mixes in" some presets (like strings, or a preset piano, or choir, etc) and uses the full set of the new content in the new sound library. So if you pick one performance - you may not get, for example, the Mark V + CFX. However, the CFX part wasn't taking up more resources - since it's just your built-in CFX, not new content. So throwing out that performance doesn't save you any waveform resources.

I haven't scanned through all the performances to see if any happen to even further "dumb down" the PARTs to use less velocity layers - so that one performance is more lean than the others. My assumption is that this is not the case.

Therefore, in order to trim "the fat" ("fat" is subjective, BTW - you tend to value things like key noise less when out of room) -- you need to edit the performances and manually root out velocity layers or release layers or other noise components. So it's not as easy as just throwing out performances -- as none of this performance ejection is likely to make much, if any, difference to your waveform memory utilization.

If all of these sets were free - I could generate a trimmed down version of all the sets so they would fit together with some loss of content, of course. I'm not going to touch it with a 10-foot pole as it's not clear if the work to "collapse" sound sets to fit within a smaller memory footprint is considered new work or too-close-to-the-original-derivative.

Maybe sound set ("voice library") producers will start offering slim alternatives within their releases that jettison key noise, damper noise, let you select a reduced velocity layer, etc. They could either release a collection of X7L's pre-trimmed in a few different ways, or a single X7L with some performances using only a subset of the full waveform set for a given piano (for example). Then hopefully the import function would recognize when you only import the slimmed version - your user area would not contain the extra waveforms. Then you could generate a slimmed down X7L yourself using this method.

For now, you're going to do a little more work if this is the goal.

One last postscript: I initialized the keyboard with much fear and trepidation, but of course made a backup file as well as a user file. Then I loaded each piano library, and imported only the piano I wanted. I made a library file from that and initialized the user area. I did that with the Bösendorfer as well as the American Grand. I then loaded those individual libraries, followed by Chick's Mark V, and I was able to also load the Phat Analog 2. I still have about 300 M to spare, but it won't let me load anything else. It took probably about 4 hours (I left the machine during initializations). But at least I have my libraries back. I think I'll stop whining and just be grateful lest Yamaha strike me with something worse.:) I still would like to know why this happened in the first place. I don't have any (audio) songs or other wave files loaded

Unfortunately, importing only the piano you wanted imports all the Waveforms and Samples when it concerns these large single instrument Libraries. Whether you import one Bosendorfer Performance or all 16, the amount of Waveform data is the same. Same goes for Chick Corea Mark V and the AG... hundreds of Performances can be made from the same Waveforms - this is always true in a synthesizer, and is true here as well.

I explained to you why this happened, you most likely had USER BANK data in memory at the time. Trust me on this... when working with assembling your own custom data, there comes a time where, if you are not careful, you have data in USER that is impacting your usage statistics.

Because .X7L go directly from File into the next available Library location... attempting to install a newly assembled Library File before initializing the User can be the cause of what happened to you. You are making things more complicated than they need be... I do not recommend trimming anything off your downloaded or purchased Libraries until you are much better acquainted with the Montage. I suggest you choose wisely what gets installed.

The Bosendorfer, the American Grand, the Chick Corea Mark V, all fit nicely along with the Blue Man Library with room to spare. I am not familiar with Phat Analog 2 and don't know it's statistics... but remember once you reach any of the limits (be it the 2048 Waveforms; or the 8192 Samples*; or the 1.75GB) the memory will report full... which ever limit is reached first.

* the number of individual Samples used is (still) a hidden value, unless the author reveals the total... or you view the file in an Editor.
Waveform, with a capital 'w' in Yamaha-speak, is a collection of samples; it can be as few as one sample and as many as two hundred fifty-six samples in the collection.

Going in and trimming what you consider unnecessary details can result in 'diminishing returns' unless you are deeply familiar with the programming as done by the original author. But when that time comes, with the right tools, sure, go ahead. But if you are still scratching your head over Waveforms occupying USER... I recommend "choose wisely" what you install to Flash.

I should explain, when you use Library Import to 'assemble' a new Library, the data in each Part is redirected to a User Waveform number ... once you SAVE to a .X7L File, clear the User Waveform area, BEFORE installing the new LIBRARY. Clearing the User makes room for the New Library. Also consider the Library data you imported from... you can Delete that old Library (unless you want to duplicate data although I can't image why). So the first couple of times you are managing Libraries you are unsure of what to do, what to keep, when you can delete data, etc. Fear not, making mistakes, if you have your data in files you can always reconstruct (as you have done). Congrats!

Hope that helps.