I need help connecting my casio wk-500 to my mac. I searched the forums beforehand to see if this has already been asked, which I'm sure it has, but the search results didn't really bring up anything related. Maybe I suck at searching, idk. BUT! I am running mac os 10.5.8 on a macbook pro and the casio manual says if I'm connecting the keyboard to the piano for the first time, it will automatically download the drivers/software/whatnot.

This didn't happen. I have audacity and garage band as my music editing options. Oh and I'm using a usb cord to connect my computer to the keyboard. I have no idea what I'm doing so hopefully one of you can help or direct me to a post where this was resolved.

Also, I figured out how to save tunes I made to an SD card that can be inserted into the keyboard, but I have no idea what the file type is or how to open it up on my computer so if anyone can help there as well it would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

If you connect the Casio to the Mac with a USb cable there is not much else that needs to be done. It should "just work". Likely it is already working fine and you just need to know what to do with it.

The data on the memory card is "midi". It's not audio. It is a record of all the keypresses and key velocities kind of like a player piano roll. This is also the kind of data that goes over the USB cable. On a mac you should be able to double click on a midi file and have it play in Quick Time using a default setup. Does the file end in ".mid"?

Audacity is useless for MIDI data. It works with audio. It you have a Mac use Garage Band. It can record both audio and MIDI and lets you reacord, edit and play back both kinds of data.

The first step to getting this setup is to look at the "audio midi setup" applation. Run that. It has a test where you can type something on the computer and hear it on the casio and play a note on the casio and hear it on the computer. After you verify this then Garage band should work for MIDI recording.

When using MIDI the sound is generated by software "virtual instuments" that are built into Garage band. They are not bad. Apple sampled a Yamaha grand piano and has some uprights, oragns and 100+ other things

If you want to capture audio from the Casio into the Mac then you need some audio cables with the correct ends on them.

yeah that pretty much sums things up. I've never done anything in this area before and needed a little info to get the ball rolling so to speak. I got it to work in garage band.

As far as the data on the sd card goes, I have no idea what kind of file it is. I think it maybe it was just meant for backup or to be able to store lots of data as the memory built into the casio isnt very much, so they allow you to transfer it to other sources. the file names represent what they call what you record, for example one file is .SP7 and thats when I recorded a song. another was AL7 and thats when i chose to record all.

But now that I can connect it to my computer that doesnt even matter because I'll just be recording through the computer from now on.

Thanks a bunch

Have you seen this?
http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#garageband