This post, written by Elder Prince, falls under the micro-update category.
It offers a glimpse into the work happening between major reveals—technical steps that, while less exciting, are essential to making real progress. Just long hours and geeky stuff behind the curtain!
My PSR-S910 is now mostly mapped into JSON files.
These last four days haven’t been my idea of fun. Last time, I mentioned I was buried in an 80-page data list for my Yamaha PSR-S910, trying to wrangle it into something C# can actually understand.
This music workstation is a serious piece of gear, not exactly beginner-friendly with plug-and-play simplicity. Not surprising, considering it cost me 2,500 CAD in 2012—so yeah, I want to make it count today.
I wish I could say the parsing process was quick, but honestly, it’s been a super time-consuming chore. ChatGPT helped with some automation, but it struggled to read the PDF properly and initially gave me flat text with too many errors I had to fix manually.
It wasn’t ChatGPT’s fault because I even tried parsing the PDF programmatically myself, but Yamaha’s inconsistent table formatting made that route pretty inefficient. They structured everything in columns, but the rows? Pretty much nonexistent, making it really unclear which data matched which values. Half the time, things were misaligned with weird offsets.
In the end, the best solution was taking screenshots of each table and feeding them to ChatGPT. But to get accurate results, I had to tweak the tables by hand first. Each row needed to be clearly separated with a visible line. And guess what? If I left a cell empty, ChatGPT would lose its mind; so I had to fill in placeholders like “NONE” just to keep it sane. Definitely a time-consuming process!
That got me about 95% accuracy—not bad, but I still had to double-check every single field (probably around 100,000… RIP my eyesight) to make sure everything was spot on.
Funny enough, I found out that Yamaha now provides Excel tables for their newer products. So if I ever upgrade to the PSR-SX920, I won’t have to go through this madness again.
That probably wraps up this milestone. Next up: time to start playing around with actual sounds from my workstation’s tone generator!
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