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.

    7 months later

    StylePlayer
    Witam serdecznie. To jest dobra wiadomość, że taka strona została przez Ciebie utworzona. Jestem w trakcie testowania plików. Wszystko co opisałeś jest bardzo dobrze przemyślane, jest tylko kwestią czasu, aby się to wszystko spełniło, nowatorskie marzenie❤. Za jakiś czas się odezwę. Pozdrawiam, życzę dużej WENY... Edmund 👍

        Edmund Nowośnicki Thank you, glad you liked it!
        If possible, would be great to keep the conversation in English so more people can understand (can just paste your message into google translate before posting).

          Thanks so much for working on this! Great work so far. I will be a frequent visitor.

          Please consider also having full midi files configured to work well with arrange keyboards.

          Just arrived here. Thanks for this great idea!!!

          Congratulations with this initiative.
          This is where I have waited a long time and I think this site has a bright future.
          Thanks for now for all your work and time.

          Thank you everyone, I am really glad you liked this project! If you have any feedback or ideas for improvement please don't hesitate to share.

          StylePlayer Hello and thank you for creating such a community. Hope it will grow and be successful.

          I am an arranger player myself for years and know how nice it is to have a good style to play with. In past there was only one similar useful site - PSR tutorial. Hope this one will be more modern and next leap forward, or supplemental to that…

          I player Tyros4 for years, had PSR-SX900 for a year and recently was able to upgrade to used Genos.

          I have a couple of custom adjusted/built styles that I can share. Most of them are edited factory styles with different parts copied from different styles to accommodate my personal needs. Some have rewritten parts. Maybe someone will find them useful.

          Best wishes, MHOD.

            Hello there.

            Like you say, we all have our own ways of storing the style files we've gathered over the years. I've lost count of the different ways I've tried to catalogue the hundreds I've collected. A lot of these styles don't work on my keyboard, some do half a job, others need editing as instruments are missing, some have no fills or one touch settings. These are the ones I am going to edit to make useful when I get the time. Problems is, I never get around to it. I need something that tells me this style is going to play on my instrument well without editing, it's worth the bother of downloading and I can spend more of my time playing the instrument. It would take me the rest of my life to learn the skills to carry out all the work on my own.

            This community will give us all the opportunity to contribute what we are able to do. I can certainly upload styles and review their functionality and worth. I can also report which files function on my keyboard and recommend any improvements that could be made. If the more skilful members could provide some easy to understand instructions on editing we could all contribute a little bit more.

            We've waited a very long time for something like this and I feel we've all relied on PSR Tutorial for our styles or the few internet sites storing sometimes dubious style files.

            I look forward to visiting this site often and hopefully contributing and learning more about these keyboards we all love so much.

            Regards Steve

              Stevie Thank you Steve, that's exactly what I am hoping to achieve, so we can all join forces and organize that mess that accumulated over decades once and for all, hopefully.

                With
                your project you are hitting the nail on its head. Watching your Youtube video reminded me on my own agony with this topic which I tried to soothe with an automated excel database of songs and styles.
                But your product looks like a convincing approach to take us all forward.
                Thanks fot this effort!!!
                Good luck for you and us!

                I accidentally found this site. All I can say is Wow.

                As a relatively new arranger keyboard user I have been though a lot of pain trying to find specific styles. I downloaded all sorts of zip files of styles all of which used different naming protocols. I used a bulk editing tool to create a consistent naming protocol across all the files which I then merged into a huge single folder. I then had to split the folder into smaller files and put them on a USB stick so I could select them directly from my keyboard. I have ended up with several thousand styles of which I will only ever use a relatively tiny number. What a pain all that was!

                So many thanks for creating this site. It is exactly what is needed.

                Thank you and congratulations. Really nicely done. As a new owner of a PSR SX-720, I sure will spend a lot of time here.
                The function to save the styles directly to the keyboard is brilliant. It reminds me of the soundmondo site that I use to directly download patches to my Yamaha MODX before.

                Hello,
                A big congratulations again for the creation of this site which brings us real riches: advice, tips, sharing of styles and many other things that I have not yet discovered, because I am new to this forum.
                I was lucky, two days ago, to find 3 UVN voices that a member of the forum had shared. Alas, no way to find the author of the publication whom I would like to sincerely thank.
                I would like to know if there is a section dedicated to sharing UVN sounds (T4). The Tyros 4 is much more practical than the Tyros 5 which, unlike the T4, must imperatively use the YEM (or YEP?) software from Yamaha.
                I managed to download the intro sound "
                which fits perfectly to my Tyros 4. For UVN sounds, I am lucky to have the optional 512 MB flash card. This is the minimum necessary for expansion, unfortunately, this card is no longer available for sale.
                If anyone has UVN sounds to share, I am interested! I have a few that I could also publish as a share.
                Sorry, I may not be in the right section for my message, but it is primarily intended for all the efforts you make.

                  The voice " Lion awebawe"Sorry, I forgot to mention the UVN voice 😁

                  Tatayet Hm this is the first time I hear about the UVN files, is it something that still works on modern keyboards? We definitely need to expand to sharing voice settings and maybe even new voices/instruments, but I haven't put much thought and research into the subject yet (what is a "voice" really, how to organize them, how to download and install them, etc). If we have knowledgeable people on the subject maybe we can start a new thread dedicated to implementing a voice catalog.

                      StylePlayer
                      Hello. UVN voices are voices in much richer extensions (waveforms) than the original ones which are in Vce. It's a shame, in the discussion, I can't attach an example and there is no section on the forum for that, I think.
                      For the extension of these voices, the Tyros 2 uses TVN, the Tyros 4 and 5 use UVN. A huge advantage for the T4 compared to the T5, the Tyuros 5 must imperatively use the YEM software, it's a pain to replace a single voice because you have to erase everything and start downloading the voices again! The Tyros 4 is ten times more practical, no need for this software! We download these voices with the "voice creator" in the menu on the T4 keyboard.
                      On the other hand, you have to install a flash card which, nowadays, is impossible to find (512 MB or 1 GB) in order to be able to use these voices in waveforms. I leave them and use them with a USB key, but you can easily put them on the hard drive. I have voices that require more than 20 MB, you can imagine that it has nothing to do with the original ones that are barely 1 KB! For example, I have a female choir voice or children's choirs, men or women, the waveforms take 14 MB, but it gives you chills when it sounds on the keyboard.
                      It would be too long to explain, I invite you to take a look on the web to get information. If you have a way for me to publish a test of a Uvn voice, even if it is only a 1 MB voice, give me the details; it would surely interest the owners of Tyros who have the flash card.
                      I managed to find a used one, 512 MB two years ago, I would have preferred the 1 MB but I already have a lot of UVN voices, organ sounds, sax, flutes, Montavani violin, a shadows guitar... breathtaking! Nothing to envy the DX 7, Korg M1 or D50, it's sometimes better!
                      Card not found, I put the link to have an overview, the 1 MB is also not found even second-hand. Happy the owners who certainly do not plan to sell it!
                      https://www.amazon.fr/Yamaha-Flash-Memory-512-Mo-Motif/dp/B0049P23Y8

                          Tatayet I see, thank you for the explanation. Yeah it would be great to have a place to share new instruments, but currently it's probably in distant plans, I wanted to focus first on the factory voices/ots settings. But lets see if there is a high demand for UVN voices, maybe there is, then we can look into it sooner.

                          Thank you.