PSRREGSHUFFLE

psrregshuffle (PSR Registration Shuffler) - A program for organizing PSR registration bank files

psrregshuffle [options]

−−version

show program’s version number and exit

−h, −−help

show this help message and exit

If you’re using your PSR keyboard for live gigs you’re most probably employing its registration banks for storing each song’s panel settings. After some time you might grow quite a large set of registration banks this way. While creating those is quite straight-forward organization is quite time consuming. Especially if you have your banks organized according to your set list.

In most cases a song’s settings don’t change (much) between gigs. But the set list might change. And than you’re spending quite some time with assembling new registration banks out of your existing banks. What makes the process so time consuming is the fact that you always have to store your new bank to disk in order to load another one which holds the settings for the next song. Than you need to load the new bank again for storing the song in it. And so on.

The PSR Registration Shuffler is meant to set an abrupt end to this. You will still need to create your registrations on the keyboard. And you need to apply changes to them on the keyboard, too. But when you’re preparing for an upcoming gig and need to assemble new bank files out of pre-existing registrations only, you can do so within the comfort of your computer at a speed unmatched by the keyboard.

PSR Registration Shuffler maintains a data directory where you need to import your bank files to. During that process the bank file gets split up into single several singular file which each contain one registration. In that regard the data directory resembles a library with all available registrations.

This can be used to assemble new bank files which can be transferred back to the instrument. Assembly can either be done manually with the registrations in arbitrary order or automatic. The last feature is called »Batch creation« because it creates a whole series of bank files with just a few mouse clicks. Please note that the act of transfer is out of scope for the PSR Registration Shuffler. Depending on your keyboard model you can use a floppy disk, an USB storage device or some other kind of connection.

As an added bonus you can set the name of each registration on the computer, too. So you don’t have to do so on the keyboard which also can take quite a lot of time if the instrument doesn’t allow to hook up an external keyboard. But please keep in mind that this is the only supported manipulation of registrations. Since the file formats are poorly documented and widely unknown to the public there are no other changes allowed. You should do them on the instrument, anyway since on the computer you can’t listen to your changes.

The current version fully supports the following instruments:

• Yamaha PSR-2000
• Yamaha PSR-3000
• Yamaha PSR-S900
• Yamaha Tyros
• Yamaha Tyros 2

The user-interface mainly consists of four tabs:

• Create Bank Files
• Import Registrations
• Keyboard Information
• About

Yet above all tabs there is the data directory chooser. Use it in order to select the data directory where you want to import your registrations to and where you want to draw them from for assembling registration banks.

The first tab is where you can see all available registrations of the data directory and build new banks. Therefor two lists are shown side by side. In order to create a new bank just select the keyboard model, drag the registrations from the left list to the right one and push the "Save" button. You’ll be asked for the filename of the new bank then.

In order to populate your data directory you need to import registrations from existing bank files. This is what the second tab is for. Please make sure to highlight (select) all registrations which you want to import. Not-selected registrations won’t be imported.

The third tab doesn’t feature any actions. It just contains an auto-generated list of all supported keyboard models plus some information about them. This list is in no way hard-coded to the program. It gets generated each time at program startup from the detected bank file classes.

The fourth tab finally shows credits and copyright information.

There could be support for many more keyboard models. Although many keyboards of a line share a very similar file format it might be that support for your specific model is missing, yet. Unfortunately many file formats remain unexplored because there has simply no one stepped forward yet and provided sufficient test data. So if you want your certain instrument to be supported please come in touch with me.

Although the list of available registration can be sorted alphabetically it might happen the in batch mode registrations get stored in a slightly different order. The reason for this lies on the behaviour of the displayed list. It sorts CAPITALIZED words before mixed-case or lower-cased words disregarding the alphabet. Unfortunately this can’t be influenced. In batch mode however a manual sort algorithm gets used which strictly sorts by alphabet as if all words were capitalized.

If you run the program without displaying its console output you might not get a visible feedback when you try to use umlauts in registration names. Using them is not allowed but the exception generated by the ascii converter when it finds an illegal character won’t be catched. Instead the runtime system dumps it to the console and stops the last operation. If this happens to you try to rename your registrations and eliminate special characters.

At the moment this program is maintained by just one person (me). However as it is put under an open-source licence it could definitely use more hands working on it. This does not necessarily involve programming. There are many ways to contribute. If you feel up to the task please get in touch with me.

Written by Dennis Schulmeister <dennis −at− ncc−1701a.homelinux.net>

Copyright © 2008 Dennis Schulmeister

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.