Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Other people do Piano Marvel?

I'd be interested to know if anybody on here uses PM on an iPad connected to a P45.

If I was ever to buy a portable keyboard to use when away from home, this has always been the keyboard that I intended to get.

P.S I see that they have made some major changes to the iPhone app.

if you look up about 3 responses - i spoke about this very scenario - it's the problem i have.

I think keybords fall into roughly three categories:

- Keyboards with USB ports that are powered from a separate power supply (the P45 falls into this category)
- Keyboards with USB ports that require power from the host device (iPad in this case)
- Keyboards with old-style 5-pin MIDI ports

iPads fall into two categories:
- iPads with a Lightning Port
- iPads with a USB-C Port

With a powered USB keyboard and a USB-C iPad you can just use a relatively standard cable, although you won't be able to charge the iPad at the same time it's connected to the keyboard without additional adapters.

With a powered USB keyboard and a Lightning iPad you can use the Apple USB 3 to Camera Adapter in combination with a standard USB cable. It's a clunky solution but it does offer the ability to charge at the same time you're connected to the keyboard. There are other 3rd party cables/adapters that may or may not work.

With either type of iPad you can use a wireless MIDI adapter like this one without requiring any direct wired connection to the iPad at all. Thus you have the freedom to connect your normal charging cable to the iPad if you like or leave it completely wireless. I would also say this is the solution that's best supported by Apple since wireless MIDI is a standard feature of iPadOS.

I know. I replied to your original post.

However you do not appear to have attempted to try it out for yourself and are relying on what you have been told by somebody at PM.

In your post you said that according to PM, midi is not supported by Apple in the latest version of iOS however that is exactly the setup that I have been using every day for more than 2 years with no problem.

I do not believe that there is a problem with connecting a P45 to an iPad and using Piano Marvel (I’d imagine that this is a very common setup for PM subscribers) however if there is somebody on here using this setup it would be nice to get confirmation that it works before I buy one.

Relevant thread on Apple support forum about some kind of issue with iPadOS 15.4 and MIDI over a direct USB connection:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253771323

thanks - this answers my question that PM did not - evidently the problem persists with 15.4.1

One more data point - might be specific to Yamaha devices and IOS 15.4/15.4.1:

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/704758

With my iPad, I’ve used a Casio keyboard (usb connection) and a Kwai ES110 (Bluetooth) recently, no trouble.

(Edit: Not using piano marvel, however)

i haven't tried it because i don't have the necessary connections, and not sure i want to go there. i play piano at a fair place, not beginner, not intermediate, but i have issues i would like to work on - and since there is a 55 year gap between my formal lessons and now - i thought PM might be a good solution.

no worries.

Hello, new to piano marvel. Installled it mostly to try the sight reading feature.
Sorry I cannot read all the previous posts in this thread so please allow me to ask without reading:
I tried connecting my iPad (version 14.8.1) with a printer usb cable to usb c n the iPad side and I saw significant delay , ie I was perfect on the beat but the app saw a significant delay and so my score was very low. Wired Headphones are connected to the digital piano directly.

I also tried another configuration: connected a win10 laptop to my piano using the printer usb cable only. This time there is no lag and my sasr score raised to its correct value, but I want to use headphones , and so in this configuration I hear the beat/metronome from the computer but the piano sound from headphones , which is uncomfortable too.

Could you please advise what is the best configuration to hear everything from headphones ?

I know nothing about Apple but someone may have an idea for you.

The only thing that ever worked for me is a low cost mixer to combine the PC and piano outputs.

You can turn the piano volume all the way down and have PM output a MIDI piano along with the regualr PM audio. I can't bear this but you might try it and see what you think.

Thanks for the suggestion , TomInCinci.
I can hear the virtual piano from my laptop. It is a solution for now without buying additional equipment, but I would expect that a better solution should be available (practicing sight reading is not the most pleasing sound for the other people living in the same house)

Amen to that. The military could use recordings of my practice for enhanced interrogation.

Here's the closest thing I see to my old mixer. Mixer

On a Mac it's easy to use a separate virtual piano application (e.g. Pianoteq, Ivory, VSL) and actually get much better piano sound than what your digital piano generates itself. It all comes from your computer so there's no need for any kind of mixer. You simply run the virtual piano and turn down the virtual piano sound in Piano Marvel. What makes it so easy is that on a Mac there's no problem having two applications processing the same MIDI input simultaneously.

I don't use Windows for my piano stuff but on Windows I'm not sure if it's quite as simple for two different apps to handle the MIDI from your digital piano simultaneously. If not then there are apparently workarounds like this one: https://hautetechnique.com/midi/midisplit/

Kanefsky, please read my message that starts with “Hello, new to piano marvel”
My DP has a great sound but if I use headphones connected to the DP then I cannot hear the metronome of PM and if I use headphones connected to the computer then I don’t hear the piano itself but some kind of low quality piano that PM has .
I don’t really want to complicate things with additional software (ie VST). The problem is specific to PM.

If you don't want to "complicate things with additional software" that's your choice, but it's really not complicated at all -- especially in the case of Pianoteq. It's just a small app that you launch and which you can immediately minimize and never look at again which will generate extremely high-quality piano sound from your computer to go along with what you're doing in Piano Marvel. You would turn down the low-quality Piano Marvel piano and listen to headphones connected to your computer. This is exactly how I've been doing it for many hundreds of hours with Piano Marvel and also for practicing outside of Piano Marvel.

Hi Kanefsky, Could you briefly explain to me how to use Pianoteq in Piano Marvel? How is the setup of your piano to computer and the settings in the software, PM and Pianoteq ? I have the program but don't understand much about it. And could that also replace the midi in Synthesia? Thank you in advance. You can also send it in a private message if you want.

I'm using a Mac, which as I noted makes everything a little bit easier, but the same thing is possible on a Windows PC as well. More on that in a bit.

It's simply a matter of running any program that can receive MIDI from your keyboard and convert it to piano sounds. Pianoteq is just one example which I mentioned because it's really easy to use. It doesn't require you to download huge sample libraries or use cumbersome copy protection (iLok). You can also download it and run it in demo mode to make sure everything works before you have to pay any money for it.

The idea is simply that you have two programs running at the same time independently from each other and both receiving MIDI from your keyboard. One of them turns the MIDI into high-quality piano sounds and the other one analyzes the MIDI and scores you on how well you're playing a particular exercise (and also generates music to accompany what you're playing).

You're not doing anything to configure PM so that it knows about Pianoteq or vice-versa. The only thing you really need to do in PM is turn down the virtual piano sound (under Instrument Settings) so that it's not generating low-quality piano sounds at the same time that Pianoteq is generating high-quality piano sounds. You only want PM to generate the accompaniment (and other things like the count-in or metronome) but not the notes that you're playing yourself.

For this purpose I'm just talking about running the simple standalone player application that Pianoteq and every other virtual piano comes with. They also come with plugins that are designed to be used with DAW software (Pro Tools, Ableton, Logic, etc.) but you don't need to mess with any of that stuff. Generally it's as simple as double clicking the standalone player application and then selecting which MIDI device you want to play sounds from. After that you could spend all day trying different piano sounds to find the one you like best but that's not required.

Now back to the Mac vs. Windows issue: On a Mac all of this is incredibly simple because on a Mac you can run two different applications (Pianoteq and PM in this case) and they can both receive MIDI from your keyboard and do their thing without either one caring about the other one at all. On Windows there's an issue where one application gets exclusive access to the MIDI device so that other applications can't use it at the same time. But there is a simple utility you can use that will make your keyboard appear to be two different MIDI devices so that you can simply tell Pianoteq to use MIDI device A and PM to use MIDI device B and they can do their thing without knowing that it's really just one device. It's like plugging an adapter into an electrical outlet so you can plug in two things instead of just one. Here's a link to the utility: https://hautetechnique.com/midi/midisplit/

I hope that helps. Let me know if I didn't explain it clearly enough or if you need more specific instructions.

Thank you very much, I'll try it out tomorrow and keep you posted.

It doesn't work, my piano is not recognized in the program. I have AUX out from piano to computer and midi UM One. But it's not really necessary, my sound is ok. Thank you for the effort.

Your keyboard is recognized as a MIDI device by Piano Marvel right? It would be very strange if Pianoteq didn't show the exact same MIDI devices as Piano Marvel. It's kind of hard to figure out what's going on without more specific information.