10,217 midi song files, including 5,000 songs from PSR Performers, all playable directly on your Yamaha keyboard. NOTE: this is a complete revision of the original MIDI Library released in 2012.

Before reviewing what is in this collection, let's talk a little bit about "MIDI". Consider the definition below, which I extracted from MIDI - from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Your PSR, PSR-S, Tyros, or Genos keyboard incorporates the above MIDI standard. When you record a song on your keyboard, you are creating a "midi file" of that song. If you "play" that midi file, you hear the music just as you created it on your keyboard. If you give that midi file to a friend, who also has a Yamaha keyboard, that friend can play your midi file and it will be just as if you were sitting at his or her keyboard and playing!

That means people can record songs, save the midi file, and then share that midi file with others so that they, too, can enjoy the recording. Because MIDI defines a standard, that midi file can be played on any device that can play midi files. That includes things like other arranger keyboards and computers. You can download midi files from many sites on the internet, midi files that were created by a wide variety of instruments or software, and then play the files on your computer or on your Yamaha keyboard. As a result, you have access to thousands of songs that can be loaded as midi files and played on your Yamaha keyboard.

There is a catch, however. If you have recorded a midi file, saved it, and then tried to play it on your computer, you may have been dismayed at how different it sounded from your original wonderful recording. What's wrong? When you recorded the song, you used a beautiful tenor sax voice that is built into your keyboard. On the computer, however, that voice wasn't anything like what you heard on the Yamaha. That's because the midi standard said to play a tenor sax voice and your computer played a "generic" tenor sax sound -- it does not have the sound engine that is in your Yamaha keyboard. So the "voices" you hear from your computer will not sound like the voices in your Yamaha. In fact, it is the excellent instrument voices in the Yamaha arranger keyboards that make them so attractive.

However, if you play a midi file created on another Yamaha keyboard and play it in your keyboard, it will sound like it did in the original. Similarly, you may find that even midi files created on a computer using a sequencing program will sound great on your Yamaha because they are playing the voices that are provided by the Yamaha sound engine.

MIDI Files in This Collection

This collection was originally gathered and released in March 2012, ten years ago. The files were organized into top-level folders based on where the files came from. It had songs contributed by the PSR Performers, and individual midi collections from PSR Tutorial contributors Freddie, Flip, Jeff, and Doug. This provided credit to the various sources of the midi files, but it made it difficult for users interested in finding a particular song since there were so many folders and subfolders to search through.

Due to a number of requests to rearrange these songs into one large alphabetical collection, I decided it was time to tackle that task. The filenames generally included the name of the song. All I had to do was create a set of alphabetical folders ("A", "B", ... , "Z"). Then review each filename making sure the song name was the start of the filename, and then move the file to the appropriate alphabetical folder. With over 22,000 midi files, in very many folders and subfolders, this first step took a lot of sorting and checking. Fortunately, I had some tools that proved to be a great aid in revising this collection.

As you might imagine, there were thousands of files that appeared in multiple collections. I used the MIDI Database program to read in all the midi files in a folder (and subfolders). It identifies a lot of characteristics of the included midi files. It is also able to identify files that are exact duplicates of each other. From the MIDI Database Manual: "Duplicate files in this case are files with identical contents (i.e. every byte of the data in the file is the same). The files may have different names, different creation dates and different attributes (like read-only, read/write, …)." In addition to identifying duplicate files, the program provided an option to select one of each pair of duplicates and then to MOVE that file elsewhere on your computer or trash it. Moving very carefully, I opted to move these files to other folders initially. After everything was sorted and checked out, I could then go ahead and delete these duplicate files.

Although the goal was to have every filename reflect the song represented by that midi file, I ran into two cases that were exceptions. Many of the midi files include two or more songs in the file. For example, "Christmas Medley.mid" gave no hint as to what actual songs were included. So, I decided to make a separate folder for Medley. Here I was delighted to discover I could use the Windows "Search" function to help. Searching on the word "Medley" revealed all the files in the folder I was looking at that had that term in the filename. I could then easily move them over to the Medley folder. The final Medley folder holds 500 files.

Another problem case were songs that were the "theme" from a movie, broadway show, or TV show. The filename tended to represent the show name. I created a folder called Theme From. The filenames here reflect the particular movie or show for example: 'Ben-Hur'.mid, 'Bonanaza'.mid, or 'Dr-Who'.mid. There are about 280 files in this collection.

All the remaining files are sorted by song name and are in alphabetical folders. From the original 22,000 files, this revised collection has over 10,000 unique files. 9,400 of these are in the alphabetical folders.

I originally had 26 alphabetical folders during the sorting. Some folders had lots of songs, some had fewer songs. I revised the top level folders to try and keep each under 500 songs. 17 of the original alphabet folders are now stored in 6 folders with multiple letters (E-F, J-K, N-O, P-Q-R, U-V-W, and X-Y-Z). Within each folder the songs are listed alphabetically so it is easy to, for example, to split E-F back into two separate folders ("E" and "F") if desired.

In three cases (A, I, and S), where there were many songs under that letter, I decided to divide the group into two parts. For example, instead of a single "S" folder, you see two folders ( "Sa-Sn" and "So-Sy").

PSR Performer Songs

About half of the songs in this collection were performed by various PSR Performers. A decade ago, performers sent in songs in midi format. Over the years, the MP3 format has become more popular for sharing songs. The songs are organized alphabetically by song title. The file names show the song title in mixed case. For example, the song "These Foollish Things" would show up as "TheseFoolishThings" in the filename. Songs performed by any of the PSR Performer include a 6 character code after the song title. The first 2 digits are a 2-letter abbreviation of the performer's name (see table below) and the last 2-digits represent the keyboard the song was recorded on (see Keyboard table below). For example, the filename "TalkOfTheTown-AG113k.mid" represents the song "Talk Of The Town" recorded by the late Alex Green on his PSR-3000. Unfortunately, quite a few of these early performers are no longer with us, but there music lives on.

Additional Files

I was able to generate the statistics on how many midi files there are in this library by using Peter Wierzba's Midi Database program. Peter's Style Database is very useful in organizing your style collections. So, too, is his Midi Database if you want to organize your midi collections. The "Utilities" folder included with this collection has the latest version of the Midi Database (V4.9). Peter updates his programs on occasion. Check Peter's web site for more information on these databases and to check for any more recent updates.

Another useful program for working with MIDI files is Michael Bedesem's MidiPlayer. I have included that program and the latest update (Ver 8.3.1) in the Utilities folder. Visit Michael's MidiPlayer page on the PSR Tutorial web site for more information on what you can do with MidiPlayer and to check if any newer updates are available.

Performer Abbreviations

Abb	Performer	Abb	Performer	Abb	Performer	Abb	Performer
AG	Alex Green	EL	Eileen Lowry	JF	Joe Francis	PA	Patricia Harman
AK	Alex Kruger	EM	Ernie Mulder	JG	James Gracey	PH	Phil Hall
AP	Alan Paganelli	ES	Eddie Shoemaker	JJ	James Hunter	PJ	Paul Jackson
BB	Bob Boyd	FA	Francisco Albuquerque	JK	Jannie Kroese	PZ	Pauline Z
BC	Ben Corsetti	FB	Frank Blecha	JP	Jaap Poetsma	RH	Richard Herzog
BG	Bob Gelman	FP	John Phillips	JR	John Radford	RJ	Ron Jubenville
BH	Brian Haylett	FT	Franco Tancredi	JS	Judy Short	RL	Robert Lauzon
BM	Bruce Milne	GH	Gloria Hanson	JV	John Vishnoff	RM	Bob McKinney
BV	Bill Venice	GK	Gary Kilby	JW	Joe Waters	RP	Richard Peck
CB	Chris Bell	HA	John Haddleton	KS	Ken Stenzel	SH	Sunny Haddleton
CC	Cynthia Cooke	HB	Harry BrownRigg	LG	Larry Gard	SM	Stephen Molnar
CE	Clem Ebber	HE	Hal Eaton	LM	Laura Remson Mitchell	SP	Peter Hindley
CH	Chuck Hunt	HK	Heikki Kähkölä	LW	Larry Warner	TA	Ton Anthonie
DB	David Bate	HM	Deane Peters	MC	Bill McCracken	TG	Torben Goldin
DE	Dave Edwards	HP	Patrick Hannequin	MG	Marcelo Gaspar	VA	Vince Andreone
DH	Dennis Hooker	HS	Hermann Schunk	MM	Michael MacDonald	WM	Bill Mulholland
DK	Del Kay	JC	Julio Cazes	MZ	Mike Szmania	WP	Warren Peters
DL	David Laplante	JE	Jerry Ernst	NS	Neal Saunders	WS	Will Stewart

Keyboard Abbreviations

Abb	Keyboard	Abb	Keyboard	Abb	Keyboard	Abb	Keyboard
T4	Tyros4	91	PSR-S910	T3	Tyros3	S9	PSR-S900
T2	Tyros2	3k	PSR-3000	15	PSR-1500	21	PSR-2100
11	PSR-1100	T1	Tyros	2k	PSR-2000	9P	9000Pro
35	PSR-350	9k	PSR-9000	74	PSR-740	73	PSR-730
63	PSR-630	C2	CVP-209	C3	CVP-309	C4	CVP-409

Joe Waters
January, 2023

This page updated on February 15, 2024.

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