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I acquired a Yamaha PSR-280. It came with audio issues that I temporarily fixed but it then returned. I found out that It was a hardware flaw. Some chip kept loosening or something. This is when I got the bright idea of extracting the instruments and making a SoundFont off of it. The problem is, there are absolutely NO GUIDES for this. I know, I know If I want to do this I should probably make my own program or mod it physically.

1.) I literally don't know how to code

2.) There isn't really that much documentation on it

I wanted to consult StackExchange before giving up. Does anyone have a copy of the instruments or know how to extract them?

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Doing this "the hard way" by recording the output is going to be a) a nightmare & b) 50 times the size of the onboard sample ROM.

Re: a) You don't know which samples are single shot, which are looped, which may have a separate attack or release portion, which are simply eternally looped with a simple ADSR, which use a filter ADSR, where the sample split-points are or if they're cross-faded, whether they use round robin or single sample per velocity, whether there are samples at multiple velocities or just a filter opening…
If you don't know how to achieve even one of that set of parameters mentioned, give up now.

b) requires intimate knowledge of a)

You won't find this online anywhere on amateur sites because of a) & b) above.
There will be no official source because the work is proprietary.

I don't know how the PSR-280 is built but I'd doubt these days it would be EEPROMs, I'd expect some type of ball-grid array for the component mounting. Even EEPROMs shouldn't work loose, you usually need a special puller to remove them, BGA is pretty much a permanent structure, at consumer level.

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You don't mention which software you use, but Logic Pro 10.6 has an Auto Sampler which makes it relatively easy to sample existing hardware note-by-note. To use it, you connect the keyboard via both MIDI and audio, and then you direct Logic for which keys to sample and at which velocities, and it will automatically run the sampling process and make a best effort to automatically trim and loop them and determine an appropriate volume envelope.

The resulting samples can be quite a lot larger than what the original keyboard's ROM would be, but the process is much simpler than doing it yourself.

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  • Is there some degree of loss in this process of extracting the soundfont?
    – daparic
    Commented Apr 3, 2023 at 11:01
  • @daparic Yes, it won't be a 1:1 exact reproduction of what's in the ROM, and there will also be some degradation due to analog noise and so on. That just means it's preserving the character of the original synthesizer though. :)
    – fluffy
    Commented Apr 4, 2023 at 17:17