Hello Everyone,
I am excited to announce the first major update since the release. It includes:
1. Autodetecting style playback compatibility for all major Yamaha arrangers (Genos, PSR-SX, PSR-S 700-975, DGX-670, CVP 605-909)
This is a really exciting feature that should solve the biggest flaw of the current site. Before we relied on user contributed compatibility votes, and used some basic auto compatibility propagation based on the keyboard generation. This was very inaccurate and tedious for the users.
Now this all should be fully automated. Not only that, but it will also give you a detailed report of any detected incompatibilities if you hover over the compatibility labels (like what voices or features are missing) so you know exactly what you will need to adjust in order to make it work on your keyboard, and can decide for yourself if you want to invest time in fixing these issues in each individual case.
Perhaps it will need some further tweaking, but the most important part is we now have the framework for it in place, it's now just a matter of fine tuning it to perfection.
2. Displaying style properties
Some of the significant style properties, like whether it contains OTS, Revo or Mega voices are displayed as labels next to a style name. If you can think of any other features that would be helpful to see, leave your suggestions.
3. Genres were retired
Styles are no longer linked to genres. It was impossible to accurately define a genre of each style, and they only caused extra friction and segmentation. Now they are gone, and the "Genres" main menu is renamed to "Styles", as it should have been from the beginning probably. If you want to find styles by a genre, often the style name itself would contain a genre, so you should be able to get some matches just using a generic search.
4. Mass upload through a simplified form
The upload form was significantly simplified (due to removal of genes and compatibilities) and now allows you to upload multiple styles at once. It also doesn't require you to provide any extra information about each individual style, so you can upload large amounts of styles in one click essentially. This allows easy uploads of factory styles from misc keyboards for example.
If you want to contribute a large amount of styles that collect dust on your computer which you never played please evaluate if they are worth being listed on the site. What we try to build is a highly organized style storage linked to songs, not turn it into an anonymous style dumpster. I hope you will use the mass uploads responsibly and contribute only high quality styles, and still provide some meta data even if it's not required.
This update took me a long time to wrap as all these features are interlinked and I couldn't release one without including the others, it also required some major work under the hood, essentially now the server has access to every midi command inside a style and it understands what (most of) them mean. This will become the foundation for future revoicing, style editing, etc.
I have a long todo list of all the improvements that you suggested (keep suggesting them, every request is noted and logged), but what I want to focus on next is improving the style transfer. It is 80% there but the remaining 20% are the most significant and what would bring it to the next level. I want to make it so it not only transfers a style, but also loads it. This sounds like a minor improvement, but I think this is the most critical feature of the whole project. Not will it make style previewing much more streamlined (you can instantly preview styles without storing them on your drive first and then loading them manually), but most importantly it will unlock the ability to have instant previews when we start doing revoicing, voice editing, and other exciting stuff. It would allow you to make style edits through a site, and instantly hear live preview of how it sounds on your keyboard. That's something no other style editing software can offer, and that's what I think is the current biggest flaw and inconvenience in the whole style editing/creating workflow that makes it so unfriendly.
This could have been a trivial task if there was a sysex that loads a user style, but unfortunately it doesn't exist (or hasn't been discovered). I have some ideas how to work around it, and it looks promising.
I also want to try reverse engineer the "Musicsoft downloader" and see which protocol it uses for file transfers. It uses some older slower protocol, but that one should work on any keyboard going back 20 years probably, which will enable instant transfers (and maybe even instant previews) for a much wider audience. Our current protocol is a newer version that works faster but seems to be only supported on newer keyboards (PSR-SX or later).
I will try to get the instant transfers working in the following weeks and then I think we have enough exciting updates to do another youtube episode, which should spark some interest and bring more people.
I want to thank everyone who has been contributing styles and songs. If the complexity of the old upload form scared some of you away before I hope you give it another try.
Thank you!