Hello Everyone!
After about a year of on and off work on this project I am happy enough with where it is to open it to the public! I want to get some feedback to see if I am on the right track and if this is even something that someone besides me wants, before I sink more time into it.
First, a little about myself. I am a proud owner of PSR-SX700, though I play primarily regular piano for now. I wanted to get into arranger keyboards a couple years ago as they perfectly fit for 80s and 90s music that I love, but I was really disappointed in the state of the arranger industry which made me take a break and focus on creating this site instead.
I couldn't understand why in this day and age there isn't a straightforward site where you can simply type a name of the song you want to play and get a list of styles that go with it for your keyboard, along with chords, sheet music, reviews, etc. Instead I have to dig through some gigabytes of random zip archive dumps, excel spreadsheets, old forum threads, abandoned homepages, to just play a song, It feels like the time froze in the early 2000s for the arranger community and all the top sites and tools were made at that era and no progress has been made ever since.
As I do programming for a living I decided to combine my two passions and create this site, maybe it could spark the interest in arrangers and rejuvenate the community once again. I feel like we are past the golden era and are on a steady downhill trend where nothing new and exciting is happening anymore, so I wanted to do something about it and attract people who are thinking the same to join forces.
Alone I won't be able to do much here. So if you also like programming and music, and digging through midi in a hex editor sounds like fun to you, join in and let's see if we can build something unique together.
Here is what already working:
- Uploading, downloading, rating styles
- Attributing styles to songs and rating how well they fit
- Attributing styles to keyboards and rating how well they play on different models
- User reputation and badges for rewarding contributors
- The part that I am most proud of and that sparked the whole idea of this project: live style playback without style downloads. If you plug your keyboard via the usb to this site and go to the "live preview" tab you should be able to play any style from this site on your keyboard and hear how it sounds using your keyboard instruments. This was made to battle the annoying process of style downloading, copying it to a usb stick, loading into the keyboard. I think because this is so inconvenient most people don't even try the styles they see on the internet, now you should be able to quickly try lots of styles and download only those you like. This feature is still very early alpha and barely working, but I think it should already provide some decent value. Again, I want to get some feedback before sinking any more time into this.
Next in the pipeline:
- Leaving style reviews
- Auto detecting which keyboard model is supporting each style playback rather than relying on manual voting
- I want to try to create a system that would let you find a matching generic style to your song. This is also one of the most common problems with styles - how to figure out which one out of thousands of generic factory styles works well with a specific song. We already have song suggestions for styles, so once someone figures it out for the first time they can list it on the site, but I am talking about finding a match for any song based play patterns. I have some ideas how it can be done and am eager to build a proof of concept to see if it will work. I think this alone will be a big step and would make high quality but generic factory styles more usable.
- Smart decentralized moderation tools (I like how it is done on StackOverflow). Currently all users have equal capabilities, they can vote and contribute, but we need a notion of superusers or moderators who can do more drastic actions. The challenge is to come up with a mechanism for community self electing and discharging these moderators rather than appointing them from above. So far I've created a reputation system which can be used as a base for users growing in ranks and abilities, but this still needs lots of thinking through and tweaking. Want to see how user contributed content will do, what kind of moderation it would require, and go from there.
What's in more distant plans:
- Collect chords and lyrics
- Generate sheet music in the form of XF files
- Create an archive of voices, OTS, registrations. Mix and match voices and effects from one style inside another style.
- Allow online style revoicing and editing
- Online style creation
- Moving to other arranger brands.
And the very distant ultimate grand dream I had for many years:
- Create online collaboration for music creation, something that would become github for musicians. I think style files are a perfect use case for this idea, as unlike regular music where there is no measure for "correctness", for style files (for existing songs) the correctness can be pretty clearly defined as being audibly as close to the original as possible for any given instrument, which makes it possible to steer the style creation in one direction by multiple collaborators. Anyway, at this point this is like talking about growing strawberries on Mars. Just throwing it out my fantasies there in case someone else is thinking about the same and wants to tackle it too.
I will create separate topics for each of these future projects so we can discuss it in more detail there, as these require lots of brainstorming. The forum doesn't have many sections yet, let's see what people would want to talk about here and then we can create corresponding sections, maybe it will be just me and myself talking here. Just post everything in General or Support sections for now.
There is not much content currently on the site, I am planning to ingest a few more factory style packs from older keyboards, upload a few free styles that are floating around here and there, but after that I am hoping the community will take over the content maintenance part and I will focus more on developing the site and supporting tools.
Thank you for reading through this long post, let me know what you think about all of this, was it all a big waste of time on my part and I am trying to fix something that isn't broken, or you think we are into something exciting here.