Peter Wierzba, a software developer in the telecommunication industry and a Yamaha fan, developed the popular PSR Style and Midi Database, an essential tool for most Yamaha owners. The descriptions provided below, and the screens shots, are taken from Peter's site.

Peter also now maintains Michael Bedesem's Producer and MusicFinderView programs. You can download the latest version of both programs from Peter's Web Site.

Producer

Producer is a program originally written by Michael P. Bedesem. With the creation of Version 3.9.0 in 2016, Peter took over this project. Producer is a program for creating midi files based on keyboard styles. It is a powerful tool for creating or editing those so called Step Record files that only include the melody and special chord and style control commands. When Played or Expanded on YAMAHA keyboards, these files generate accompaniment parts. The link here will take you to Peter's web site where you can read more and download the program.

MusicFinderView, originally written by Michael P. Bedesem, is a PC editor for Music Finder (*.mfd) files. With it you can create, edit, display, rearrange, sort, and print Music Finder records. Music Finder files are keyboard specific, but with MusicFinderView you convert files from one instrument to another, for example, convert a Tyros mfd database for use on a PSR3000. The link here will take you to Peter's web site where you can read more and download the program.

PSR Style & Midi Database

The program is for managing collections of:

The need for such a program arises if you have accumulated a large collection of style or midi files. Finding a particular style or midi file in such a collection can be a very time consuming task. Using this program, however, you can perform this task very quickly.

Main features

Special feature for style files

Because of the huge number of available style files, manual cataloguing of styles is too great an effort (at least for one person or a small group). So this program utilizes an automatic "genre guessing" mechanism, which catalogues the style by examining the style file itself.

NOTE: The database program does NOT modify the style/midi files in any way. 

Screen Shots

This is not a tutorial on how to use the PSR Style Database. However, the screen shots below and the associated comments will give you some ideas of how the PSR Style Database works and what you can use it for. Note that you can click on any screen shot for a larger view of that picture.

PSR Style Database Style Mode Screen ShotFigure 1 is a screen shot of the PSR Style Database in style mode. It shows major aspects of each style in the selected folder (and subfolders). The view below includes the filename, style name, style type, time signature, tempo, number of variations, whether the style CASM, a Music Database list, or OTS.


Setting Columns

PSR Style Database Column SelectionYou can, however, specify exactly which columns are displayed in the main listing. By clicking the "Columns" button, the Select Display Columns dialog box is opened. From here you can select how many columns to show and what to put in each column. For example, clicking on the drop-down arrow to the right of the Column 10 box will display a list of all the file attributes available from which you can select an item to display in column 10. To remove a column entry, simply highlight the entry in that column and delete it. The items in the columns below that will all shift up one position.

Viewing Song Titles

PSR Style Database Song Mode screen shotA style may be associated with one or more songs for which that style is appropriate. When you add a record to the Music Finder Database, the song title associated with the style is saved internally with the style. The PSR Style Database will show you these song titles. If you click on the "View Songs" button, you will open up the Song display screen (Figure 3). Here is an example of where you would want to make sure that one of the columns was displaying the relevant style name. If you were to copy that style over to the User area of your PSR or Tyros keyboard, the song title(s) associated with that style would automatically show up in your Music Finder database.


Finding Duplicate styles

If you have collected a large number of styles from the internet, there is a chance that some of those styles, which may have different file names, are actually the same style. I know this is hard to believe, but, yes, that can happen! Well, with Peter's PSR Style Database, it is a simple matter to identify your duplicate files. If you modify your column display to include a column for "Duplicates" and then sort on that column, the duplicate files are shown together.

PSR Style Database identifying style duplicatesIn Figure 4, all the styles in the X:\styles\ folder (and its subfolders) are catalogued. The 8th and 9th styles, SWINGXG.STY and Swing.STY are identified as duplicates. You see that the tempo matches and if you also viewed the file size, you would see that these files also have identical file sizes. Similarly, the 10th, 11th, and 12th files shown are all duplicates of each other. Now that you can easily identify the duplicate files, you can select the ones you want to eliminate and "Move" them to some other folder you have created. This gets the files out of the original folder. You can then, if you want, delete the styles that were moved. The PSR Style Database will not directly delete any files itself. But it does have a nice option to select all but one copy of each unique style. With this you could move all the duplicates to some other folder in one fell swoop.

This page updated on September 20, 2024.

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