Hello everyone!
Few days ago, playing with YEM and with the Genos's free audio style packs I found something interesting that probably every s950 user want to know. (If you don't already known). I'm talking about the possibility to play Audio Styles directly from an USB external memory.
As you probably known, the S950 owner's manual says that the keyboard has approx. 64 MB dedicated to install Audio Styles... However, that's not true. The memory reserved for expansion styles is about 10 MB... so it's technically impossible to install any Audio Style expansion pack (as the size of those files are above 11 MB)... Moreover, Yamaha never released any expansion pack containing audio styles for the S950
However, as Yamaha has launched the new Audio Phraser software, there is no need to "discover" how the audio styles files are built. In such case, I don't think that Yamaha gets annoyed if I share with you this unexpected discovery.
In short... If you want to play an Audio Style in the PSR-s950, you just need to change the extension .AUS into another "normal" extension like .sty, .prs, etc.. then, if you load the style from the USB it will be recognized as an AUDIO STYLE
. (It will take a while until is completely loaded, not recommended for live gigging). The audio part of the style will be read from the USB (you will see the USB light blinking every time that the style is playing).
Just a few things to highlight:
1) The .AUS extension is recognized if the style file is located in the user memory, not in the external memory. For that reason, you should change the extension in order to play the style.
2) As the memory available for styles is very limited, you can't copy audio styles to the user memory (not even from a YEP pack...), so the only way to use such styles is from an external memory. If you try to copy the audio style (or if you save an edited audio style using the style creator included in the keyboard), the S950 will only copy the MIDI part of the style...
So, dear users, the old S950 is still alive! Hope you can enjoy the fascinating world of audio styles with it!
We just need one more thing.... Please Yamaha, make YEM S950 compatible! Best Regards!
Darius Bic