Watch as my G2 crashes on a LIVE broadcast

[chony]

Last Thursday I was doing a performance with my G2. There was an audience of 2500 people, plus a broadcast audience of over 100,000. We knew we were in trouble when the G2 crashed during rehearsals, but then it crashed during the live set - 3x in 2 minutes - something that has never happened to me in my over 20 years of using Yamaha starting with the Yamaha PSR 8000, and every TOTL arranger since.

I highly customize my Genos. All my styles are custom, many of my sounds are custom, and I use it in conjunction with Ableton Sync using stems and more. Although I have done all this with previous TOTL's, it seems that the G2 is getting overloaded. I will unfortunately be reverting back to my G1 until this is sorted.

I should note this isn't the first time it happened to me on the G2. It happened twice before, but each time it was after 4-5 hours of the keyboard being on and used. So I got into the habit of restarting the keyboard after 2-3 hours. But this time it happened within a few minutes of turning on the keyboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4GDWhQ-LX8 (sorry about the quality, I clipped it off "screen record")

Does anyone know where the Yamaha Genos customer support portal is so I can let them know?

[Amwilburn]

Mine crashes all the time... if I'm using a registration that wasn't created for it (it has nothing to do with YRM; I have a registration that I created completely on G1, that randomly crashes)

I have started creating registrations from scratch on G2, and no, no issues. Needless to say though, the more different the original registration, the more frequent the crash on G2 (I have G1 registrations that originally started life as a CVP209/309/409/509 registration, and the ones that started on the 209 (from 2001!) are especially prone to crashing. No, I rarely had such crashes on G1, even converting (using YRM) from old CVP's.

This is because as they add more and more functionality to the registrations (such as live control settings, etc) they reserved more and more text blocks in the header of the registration file, and they didn't do it cleanly like before (according to Murray Best, they even have entire sections redundantly duplicated within the new file structure)

Normally, Anything that I converted from T2/T3/T4/T5 or a CVP onto Genos, works just fine, and previously any newer keyboard can play that older model's registration; Genos can read all Tyros registrations natively, no need for conversion; and oddly, so can the PSRs970/975/sx900 (that's odd because they're not the same series)

But for the first time, their file structure has become so messy, that even native G1 registrations, I get random crashes on the G2. I've informed Yamaha of this, and they said they've sent it off to Japan to look at, but they've yet to ask me for the registrations I was using for the crash to happen, so I doubt the ball has actually started rolling

*Fortunately*, so far? Any of the registrations that caused crashes, when I downconvert using YRM to an earlier tyros registrations (I tend to go down to T2, but Murray said I probably don't need to go that far back. T4 or T5 should be enough), they work crash free on the G2.

Murray Best is a lifesaver... without YRM I would be spending *hundreds* of hours redoing all the old registrations from scratch.


Now, keep in mind, unlike all other Yamaha keyboards in history, the Genos OS (and file structures) actually changed significantly during its lifespan, this may be the root of the G2 crashes.

So if your problem is G1 registrations on the G2 causes BSOD, like me? Try downconverting them to a Tyros registration and see if that fixes the problem. For me, thus far, it has.

If it's a custom style causing the crash, then I don't know; I haven't encountered that yet.

Good singing, by the way!

Mark

[Genos!]

Posted on April 1st, I thought uh-hem, I'm about to be taken for a ride.

However, I was quite surprised after watching!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4GDWhQ-LX8

L'Chaim!

[soundphase]

I'm really sorry about this mishap.

We're not used to Yamaha equipment not being of impeccable quality. But keyboards are getting more and more complex (no excuse though).

On the bright side, perhaps: The G2's changes may be more profound than they seem compared to the G1, which means we could be in for some pleasant surprises with future OS updates.

[metcam]

Hi

All imported registrations  i resave again in my instrument and after that i never have issue.

I know is sometimes long process but working very well for me.

Best regards.

[Amwilburn]

Hi

All imported registrations  i resave again in my instrument and after that i never have issue.

I know is sometimes long process but working very well for me.
Best regards.

Yes, that is also what I'm doing, but I have *so* many Genos registrations (that were converted from CVP registrations)

Mark

[pjd]

Good luck, Chony. I hope Yamaha listens and asks for more information about your set-up and situation.

Your singers covered the failures in spectacular fashion. I keep telling the people I work with, "Keep going, don't stop, we'll catch up when we can." They should watch this video!

All the best -- pj

[pedro_pedroc]

That's sad.

I had 10 or 11 yamaha keyboards over the last 30 years, and no one crashed.
My G1, SX900, and SX700 (my actual keyboards) never crashed.

Sad news.

Pedro

[Amwilburn]

That's sad.

I had 10 or 11 yamaha keyboards over the last 30 years, and no one crashed.
My G1, SX900, and SX700 (my actual keyboards) never crashed.

Sad news.

Pedro

I can tell you, as a dealer:
I've seen crashes (and every brand) going back the last few decades. The Genos 2 is the only recent TOTLA I've seen crash because of coding from previous registrations, true; but it happend a *lot* on CVP; for some reason CVP409GP &CGP1000 could read all previous CVP registrations, but *no* other CVP could read 409GP /CGP1000 registrationa.

As I said when we first received our display model, this is a whole new baseline paradigm. They clearly worried more about advancing than about holding on to past compatibility.

But it's far from the only keyboard (or even just Yamaha) to crash. I got a *lot* of crashes with PSR2000/PSR2100, and PSRs900, T2, CVP209/305/307/309/409/409GP/509/609/605/709) but also Korg Kronos, Krome, PA1000, EK50 and M3 (their response to the customer was "things crash". I got occasional crashes on PSR3000, T1, T3, T4, T5, CVP207/CVP705/CVP805/CLP625, Roland Jupiter 80, Fantom X & G, Korg PA4x

*None* of those had anything to do with converting registrations from another previous model; HOWEVER the PA1000 (and the PA4x) crashes *can* be attributed to importing too many styles; and the Krome/Kronos crashes, 99% could be attributed to the poor write speed of the included micro sd card (this became a known issue, and statement from Korg) but with a really simple fix: buy another microsd card. The Fantom crashes could both be traced back to user samples.

*All* the CVP crashes could be attributed to importing samples from another keyboard, or loading a style from the usb and the usb was failing. So for me, seeing the G2 crash *only* when I'm importing data from other sources doesn't surprise me in the least. This happens a *lot* with other lines. It's much more surprising to me, that I only saw a G1 crash twice (and again, both times from importing non-native registrations).


If you don't deal with registrations, or USB sticks that are about to fail (I own more than 50 usb sticks, they all have a limited life span of 'writes' and once the data failure starts happening, it cascades to unreadable, hence I also have 5 hard drives with backup data as well as about 8 other usb sticks (still readable) with previous versions of my backup data.

If you don't deal with registrations, worn out usb sticks, or installing samples, then you generally will never see any crashes.
But even without those 3 critera? I managed to get the PSR2000/2100/3000/T2*/s900 Korg Kronos & Krome to crash. (no other keyboard, and like I said the Krome & Kronos were easy fixes once the problem was found).

Asterisk on the T2 because I *did* get that to crash without importing anything, *but* it had a built in voice maker (built in sampler) and i *was* making my own samples when I got it to crash. (I'd sampled bits from the Imperial March to turn into orchestral hits. It sounded *so* much better than the built in orch hit! Only problem was it was very hard to find a 1+5 chord; mostly minor chords in that piece)


Mark