Forum Attachments 2008

Contents

5,900 files with 2,960 styles, 540 midi songs, 28 mp3 files, 350 pictures, 1,780 voices, and more... $10!

The full collection includes 5,906 files requiring 275 MB of space. The compressed version is available in 4 zip files and requires 141 MB of space.

This resource collection includes all of the attachments uploaded to the PSR Tutorial Forum by members in 2008. Many of the files uploaded were ZIP files. These files have been unzipped and are included in their unzipped format. If the zip file included only one compressed file, that file is included in its unzipped format. If the zip file included multiple compressed files, they are included in a folder with the same name as the original zip file.

Also included is a complete index to all the files showing the original uploader, the date of the upload, and a link to the message thread in the PSR Tutorial forum where the file was uploaded.

File Structure

For your convenience, attachment files have been organized by type of file into 15 top-level folders. The folder name indicates the type of files in that folder:

  • EXCEL - Microsoft Excel files (.xls),
  • MFD - Music finder databases (.mfd),
  • MIDI - midi song files (.mid),
  • MISC - miscellaneous files not found elsewhere,
  • MP3 - mostly .mp3 files, but also contains some .wav files,
  • PAD - multipad files (.pad),
  • PDF - portable document format (.pdf) files,
  • PIC - picture files, which may be .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, or .png files,
  • RGT - registration files (.rgt),
  • STYLE - style files (.sty, .sst, .prs, .bcs)
  • TEXT - text files (.txt),
  • UNZIPPED - folders with contents of zip files that held various file types.
  • VOICE - voice files (.vcs, .vce, .swv, .liv, .clv, .org)
  • WORD - Microsoft Word files (.doc)

Forum Attachments Index

Summary Page

You will find a listing of the attachment uploads in the Microsoft Excel ForumIndex08.xls file (or the web version of this file, ForumIndex08.htm). If you have Microsoft Excel, you can open the ForumIndex08.xls file directly in Excel. It includes Macros and you should enable these macros when you open the file. If you don't have Excel, you can use the web version of the file. When you open either file, you see a summary page showing the number of attachment files that were uploaded under each of the 14 categories.

screen shot of forum index summary page

Note that in this summary table, a "record" represents a file uploaded, which may have been a single file or a zipped file containing many individual files. If the original file was zipped, it is unzipped in this collection and the contents are stored in a folder with the same name as the original zip file. So, some of the "records" above actually point to a folder that may contain hundreds of files. All told, this collection contains 5,906 files totaling 275 MB of information. There are almost 3,000 style files and 541 song (.mid) files. There are 28 MP3 files. At the bottom of the "Summary" page, you will see two tabs: "Summary" and "Table". The "Table" tab takes you to the detailed attachment index table.

Attachments Index Table

A screen shot of the Table page in Excel is shown below. The listing includes the original attachment file name, the main folder where the file can be found, whether the original attachment was zipped (Y/N), its size (KB), the forum ID of the uploader, the date the attachment was uploaded, and the thread in which the attachment appeared. The subject of that thread is a web link that, if you are connected to the internet, will take you right to the thread in which the posting for this file appears. You may have to scroll through the thread messages to find the posting with the attachment.

attachment index table page

The File Name entries are also links. What happens when you click on one of these links depends on your computer configuration and what programs you have associated with various file types. The possibilities are discussed below.

zip files

If the original file were a zip file, all the contents of that zip file are now in a folder (generally of the same name). When you click on the folder name, that folder will be opened so you can see the contents. (If the original zip file contained only one file, that individual file is listed by name under File Name with the file type included.)

midi files

If the attachment is a midi file, the midi file will be launched and can be played through whatever program you have on your PC associated with ".mid" files. You can have this set up so that it opens a file like Van Bosco's midi player and plays the song through your keyboard.

MP3 files

If it is an MP3, your MP3 player will start playing the song. All Windows PCs include Windows Media Player, which can play mp3 files. Apple's iTunes is another program you can download (for free from www.apple.com/itunes) and use to store and play mp3 files. Note that you can also use iTunes to convert .wav files to .mp3 files.

Excel files

If it is an Excel file and you have Microsoft Excel, Excel will be launched and the file loaded. Note: if you do not have Excel, you can download the free Excel Viewer 2003 from Microsoft.

Picture files

If it is a picture file, the picture will be opened and you can view it.

The ForumIndex08 Excel (or html) file shows records sorted by folder and then by file name. If you have Excel, you can alternatively sort the records by file name or by date or by forum ID.

NOTE: generally, the file names match the name of the attachment file. However, to provide some consistency and to make it easier to include links to files, spaces in file names have generally been replaced with the underscore character. In the links, a space is represented by "%20" and that made it much harder to read file names; so the underscore was used instead of the space. In addition, there were a few attachments that were duplicates of earlier attachments. Both attachments may be referenced in the ForumIndex08 file since they were uploaded by different people on different dates and part of different topic threads. Where this was obvious, however, only one copy of the attached file is stored in the collection and the link for the file name goes to this one copy.

Style and Midi Indexes

The ForumIndex08 file shows 832 records, but there are many more "files" than that in this collection since a "zip" file counts as only one of those records, but can contain many individual files. You will see many folders within the STYLE folder. Each of these represent a zip file that was unzipped and the contents put into a folder with the zip file name. If all the contents were style files, that folder will be found as a subfolder under STYLE.

For your convenience, I ran the PSR Style Database against the contents of this file collection to locate ALL of the styles. You will find the results in the StyleIndex08.xls or StyleIndex08.html file. You can sort the styles there by name (or tempo or time signature or folder). There are actually, 2,959 styles in the Forum 2008 collection.

I also ran the MIDI database program on the contents and it shows 541 midi files in the collection. You'll find them all listed in the MidiIndex08.xls file or the MidiIndex08.html file.

MP3 Files

In 2008, we allowed more file uploads, but large file sizes often ran into problems and so folks were encouraged to put larger files, such as MP3s, on one of the available "free" file upload sites and simply post a link in the forum to their song or files. I have not included the external files that were referenced like this. (In the original CD-ROM distribution of the Forum 2008 attachments, many of these external MP3s were included since there was space available on the CD-ROM. For this download version, the external MP3s have been eliminated.)

This page updated on March 21, 2013 .