Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Using virtual Piano Practice Rooms on Discord Pinano Server

I'm in your practice room right now. Sound is globally fine. There are some cuts and it sometimes saturates a bit, so there could be a little bit of fine tuning. But I would say it is far from mandatory, considering the principal purpose of those rooms. It is not to take a recording of the people.

Good to know, thanks. Maybe reducing the mic volume will help with the saturation. Not sure yet what to do about the notes cutting out. I'll have to play around with the settings more.

If you listen to some of the Discord Pinano biweekly recital recordings, you might notice that some people almost cut out all the time and others don't cut out at all. I suspect that it is a configuration/settings issue. Might also be hardware (computer) or Internet, though, or some combo. Googling on internet for Discord settings and cutting out might also review what the best settings are.

It wasn't cutting often, so it is really not that bad.

I listened to your practice through the web-based DiscordApp in Firefox.

When the sound was getting through, the tone was excellent quality, better than many Youtube videos. I could clearly hear nice sustain in your piano when you played Fur Elise. The dynamic range was very compressed, no difference in volume between p and f, but because of very good tone reproduction one could make a decent guess. But you were getting cut off during pauses. It was both clearly audible and visible by the green ring disappearing from around your avatar.

Your sound was better than average, some of the practice rooms sounds were hardly recognizable as a piano. In other people were practicing on acoustics with a monster reverberation. There was a girl with a cold making pauses to blow her nose and she wasn't cutting out during her pauses.

Looking at the setting in the DiscordApp in Firefox there seems to be a choice for Input Mode between "Voice Activity" and "Push to talk". Maybe the latter can be made to work more reliably than the former by putting some weight on the key used to enable the input?

Have fun, all of you! I'm not likely to venture to Discord soon, it has way too much "bad part of the town" vibe for me.

I wish the bad parts of my town were inhabited by people with pianos and learning to play the piano! Obviously some people's "bad parts of town" are other people's "good parts of town"

Please don't take my comment personally, any of you, plural you, y'all here.

It was a comment about Discord in general, both Discord corporation software quality, the broad range of the crowd that it tends to attract and the people & corporations that prey on that crowd.

Thanks for that, interesting links. As a matter of interest, "pinano" also refers to the version of the nano text editor for Raspberry PI. https://uappexplorer.com/snap/ubuntu/pinano
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@90125 - Thanks, I'll play around with Push To Talk feature. When not using that, there is an input sensitivity setting. I think that needs to be set as low as possible so that the note decay doesn't get cut off either. However, that setting goes away when using Push to Talk, so perhaps that will get rid of cut off all together. But ... I think you need to keep whatever button pressed the entire time to record.

As for dynamic range, I wonder if the software compresses it when sending to the server. Also, I have the volume on my DP set to 50%. Anything higher hurts my ears with the headphones, but I have noticed that when the volume is higher, the dynamic range seems to better. I need to figure out a way to send a higher volume with the line out, and use headphones with a lower volume.

Last night I did at times open the audio settings and listen while I played, not sure if others noticed or if they can hear when I do that. It's hard to practice like that though because of the delay in sound and it messes you up.

If you mean by that you were listening to what the room heard, and therefore you were bouncing your audio off the server, can I ask how you did that? Did you use a different login? I wouldn't be able to play like that. I would be like hearing an echo when one talks.

I asked in the channel, I was told nobody uses push to talk, and to read the pinned message below

ha, I was just on discord, then turned it off, or thought I did... then I heard somebody playing. I wonder if they could hear me? Oh dear.

I killed the process, but now I wanna go into a practice room.

You should check your settings. I also had left my mic on in a room and someone texted me in Discord asking if I was playing since my mic was on (and presumably, they wanted to listen - which was embarrassing in itself since I happen to know from some other comments I read that the particular person asking me was a conservatory student actually a bit glad I wasn't playing my Mary Had A Little Lamb )

Not listening to what the room heard, but testing the mic. If you go into the audio settings, you can test the mic. I then set the output to the laptop speakers. I press a key on piano, headphones from piano I hear immediately, but from the speakers on the laptop, it's delayed.

But when settings window is closed, I don't hear what the room hears while playing, which is expected.

Well I went in a room for a few minutes - my name on there is Helen Bacagan. A couple of people wandered in, which was a little bit nervous making. And of course everyone else hanging around in there was sort of level 497, and I'm level 3.

I think I'll do it again, but in small doses. It's good to expose oneself to people listening, but not necessarily all the time.

Haha, it reminds me of when I was in music school, doing voice, and also doing my first time as a beginner piano student. I'd go in a room to practice Mary Had a Little Lamb for piano class, and the person in the next room would be doing Rach 2 or something equally intimidating.

Well, I'm still trying to figure out the typical schedules. In the several times I've logged in to Discord since Saturday (as I mentioned above, I only was recently introduced to this by another PW member), I found there were sometimes when it seemed everyone was a conservatory student, many probably playing in their real life school practice rooms with an open mic. And there were other times when it would be more of a mixed bag. I want to map this so I can blend in better in a crowd of other "Mary Had A Little Lamb" folks! LOL.


I can see it could be good for asking for feedback though. I just don't think I need to ask Level 497 people for feedback on my "Mary Had A Little Lamb" though!

BTW, back in school, perhaps you had instances where you had last laugh if any of those piano performance majors had been taking an intro voice class and practicing their solfege in the room next to you as you were practicing Der Hölle Rache!

I think I saw a Helen in there, playing the Clementi piece? I've heard a variety of different levels playing on that server. I think after you join the room, hide the screen so that you can't see if anybody joins. Just practice as you normally would

Found out what happened - I was closing the app without logging out, but that doesn't actually disconnect you. So I was still in there (thankfully, muted.) If someone started playing in the lounge, then I'd hear it. So, from now on I shall be careful to log out and not just close the app.

Yes, I think I saw you come in, and I was working on Clementi. That's a good idea, to hide the screen.

To disconnect from the room, look at the bottom left and find "Voice Connected". Then click the phone icon with an X, that will disconnect you from the room.