Loading an MFD

Saving an MFD

The MF Screen

Sorting Records

Searching

Music Finder Editor V3.3

If you do not have Microsoft Excel or, if you have it and don't know how to use it, you may want to skip this lesson.  You will have to do all your record editing using your PSR keyboard or MusicFinderView.  But, if you do have Excel and understand how to use it, here is another great "freeware" utility created by Fabien Jansem to help you manage your MF databases.  You can obtain the latest version of the Music Finder Editor from Fabien's web site .

Music Finder Editor is a small tool to edit Music Finder files with MS Excel.  Like the MusicFinderView program, it supports a number of YAMAHA instruments: PSR-2000, PSR-1000, PSR-2100, PSR-1100, Tyros, CVP-203, CVP-205, CVP-207 and CVP-209.

Music Finder Editor will allow you to:

1. Load a MFD file with the [load MFD file] button in the "Main" sheet, part of which is shown here.
2. Edit DATA in the "MFD" sheet (see screen shot below).
3. Save that data to a new MFD file with the [save MFD file] button in the "Main" sheet.

Convert MFD files from one instrument to another.

The "Styles" worksheet holds style names and instrument internal style numbers (see partial screen shot below.). When you choose style names in the "Style Name" column of the "MFD" sheet, the. "Style #" (internal style number) is determined by looking at the data in this worksheet.  Beware, however, not all style names are appropriate for any given instrument.

The MFD Worksheet

The top few rows of the MFD worksheet are shown below.  The first column shows the record number.  When you load an MFD file, record will be sorted by record number.  The remaining columns show fields in each Music Finder record. The first screen shows columns A-G. In the second screen shot, columns A and B are frozen and you see the remaining columns H-N.

I started to explain what some of the items and symbols in the spreadsheet shown here mean, but quickly gave up on that idea.  You'll have to learn Excel on your own.  Suffice it to say that you can edit any of the entries shown below and change the data, which may be a bit easier than it is in MusicFinderView.  You can also copy all or parts of this data to other Excel spreadsheets and perform additional data manipulations.  You can add new records by adding more rows.  You can delete entries by deleting rows.  (If you add or delete, you will want to redo column A so all remaining or new records are numbered sequentially.)  Note that columns E, F, and G, represent the Favorites, SEARCH1, and SEARCH2 views respectively.  If you had used the SEARCH1 option to find all songs that used the "CountryPop1" style, those songs would have the S1 value set to "TRUE".  When you viewed the SEARCH1 results, only records marked TRUE for S1 would be shown.

You can, in fact, do any editing in the "MFD" sheet as long as:

1. You do not change the column structure, which means that Music names remain in the second column, Genres remain in the third column, and so on. (But you can change or translate those column headers.)

2. The first record starts at line 2

The saving of records stops at the first empty record number (in first column of "MFD" sheet).  So, if you delete a row, be sure to shift all the other rows up one so that you do not leave a blank row.

Using the Music Finder Editor

Excel provides a wealth of tools to manipulate data.  With Fabien's edit tool, an MFD database can be moved to Excel, data modified as desired, and then saved back into the MFD format.  Using this tool, I was able to significantly expand the number of songs available in the Music Finder database and completely redo the keyword field to include abbreviations for every fake book that any particular song appeared in.  Thus, using this tool, and the MusicFinderView above, I have been able to create a multitude of targeted Music Finder databases, in fact, one for most of the major fake books described in the fake book section.  In the next lesson, I'll explain the steps that went into creating the "master" PSR-2000 Music Finder database.

Warning: Big Database Can Be Difficult To Handle

For smaller databases, say less than 800 records, Music Finder Editor creates the new MFD database relatively quickly.  But, as the number of records grow, it takes much more time to create the new MFD.  On my older PC, for example, writing out an MFD file with 2000 records took half an hour!  Of course, you do not have to deal with such a large database.  You can have two databases of 1,000 records each or four databases of 500 records each.  When you load them into the PSR, you can start with one database using the REPLACE option, and then add the others by using the APPEND option.  MusicFinderView also takes a bit longer to handle large files, but the extra time is measured in seconds, not minutes.