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My goal is to make a midi sequencer-esque app to help me with my piano practice.

There's the usual help for metronome-ish ness:
- clip out 8 or 1 bars of drums from some midi file you find on the web and use that as your metronome to practice over.


Also, I've got a pretty decent "wait for me" learning mode working:
- You mark the left hand and right hand tracks with notes you want to practice
- The rest of the tracks are played (background tracks)
- it displays the notes of the tracks you marked
- if you miss any of the marked tracks' notes,
it'll pause till you hit em correctly.

This works IF you have your sheet music in a midi file already. Or can find or make such a midi file. (I currently have a difficult to understand .txt sheet music format that'll create a midi file from sheet music.)


Another thing I'm thinkin' bout is a
"follow me" mode along the lines of:
- mark the reference tracks you're going to try
(like above)
- you play whatever you can and the app tries to find out where you are in time according to the reference tracks' notes and listening to what you play.

Maybe even missing some of the keys is ok.
The idea is it'll both wait for you AND
follow your tempo and play background tracks to YOUR playing.
Skipping ahead or speeding up/slowing down tempo/time as needed.

Not an easy thing to figure out, but I think it's at least possible.


Well, anyways, that's what my brain will be tacklin' tomorrow morning with a good stiff cuppa joe. (The programmer's nectar)


Can anybody think of other good things a computer program could do to help a guy with piano practice?

Even if a little bit towards the impossible side ;/

Thanks in advance!

PS: Oh, and thanks to my piano teacher, my app will be undergoing a name change to


wait for it...


PianoCheater

This may help: Piano Software Review

Mark

Sounds like Synthesia http://www.synthesiagame.com/

Well, thanks, but I know about those.

Just kinda lookin' for what a couple actual people like (or would like?) best about computerized piano practice.

Like a top 2 best features for ME are
1)
2)

Ah well, that's ok, guess that's my job.
back to the lab

For example,
one epiphany i just had (thank god for caffeine!!)
was have the user (me) scan each sheet of music they've got
- a sheet per scan.

Then set up a list of musicTimeStart, musicTimeEnd, pageFilename
Like:
1,21,IdLikeToTeachTheWorldToSing_1.jpg
22,42,IdLikeToTeachTheWorldToSing_2.jpg
...etc...
A filename per page of sheet music with assoc'd begin and end bar#

And have PianoCheater display the pic in a resizable window and
flip to the next pic when that music time arrives
(or maybe a half bar before or whatever).

I think that's goin' in pretty soon, cuz i HATE page turns.
And no more "you neeeeed a midi file" constraint.
There are tons of midi files, but sheet music is almost ALWAYS a
much higher quality rendition of the song.

You could maybe even scan half pages and show 2 halves so there's
no "blind time"...

Of course, you get no "wait for me and make me play it right" functionality without midi files.
But at least you could put in a drum track to play along with
instead of those hellish metronome clicks.

And the music would STAY FLAT (on the monitor) and there'd be no page turns.

Hmmmmmm... Just kinda thinkin' out loud here...

OK, back to the code !!