Piano Booster is a MIDI file player that displays the musical notes AND teaches you how to play the piano. You can play along to any track in the midi file and PianoBooster will follow YOUR playing. PianoBooster makes sight reading fun!

Piano Booster is a free (Open Source) program available from: https://github.com/captnfab/PianoBooster/

Original work by Louis J. Barman can be found here: http://pianobooster.sourceforge.net/

A huge thanks to him and to all the contributers.

To run Piano Booster you need a MIDI Piano Keyboard and a MIDI interface for the PC. (If you don't have a MIDI keyboard you can still try out PianoBooster using the PC keyboard, 'x' is middle C - but a MIDI piano is recommend).

To hear the music you will need a General Midi compatible sound synthesizer. Unfortunately the "Microsoft GS Wavetable software synthesizer" that comes with Windows XP introduces an unacceptable delay (latency) between pressing a note and hearing the sound. For this reason the use of "Microsoft GS Wavetable software synthesizer" is not recommend. Please see the forum for possible solutions.

To run Piano Booster you need a MIDI Piano Keyboard and a MIDI-USB interface if the keyboard does not have a USB interface. (If you don't have a MIDI keyboard you can still try out PianoBooster using the computer's keyboard, 'x' is middle C).

To hear music from the computer you will need a General Midi compatible sound synthesizer. While there are many possible choices for the Mac (Timidity, FluidSynth or an external MIDI Synth), the easiest way is to use SimpleSynth, which can be obtained for free (MIT license) from: http://notahat.com/simplesynth

This must be started before Pianobooster, and also allows to load custom Soundfonts.

Double Click on the DMG file containing PianoBooster, then just drag the pianobooster.app file wherever you wish (/Application folder is suggested).

pianobooster-mac-0.6.5-alpha1.dmg (not official)

To run Piano Booster you need a MIDI Piano Keyboard and a MIDI interface for the PC. (If you don't have a MIDI keyboard you can still try out PianoBooster using the PC keyboard, 'x' is middle C - but a MIDI piano is recommend).

To hear music from the computer you will need a General Midi compatible sound synthesizer.

On Linux to start fluidsynth type the following on a terminal window.

fluidsynth -g 1.0 -a alsa -o midi.alsa_seq.id=fs2 /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2

An alternatively you can used TiMidity by type the following on a terminal window.

timidity -iA -B2,8 -Os -EFreverb=0

To run PianoBooster you will need some Midi files preferably with right and left piano parts on channels 4 and 3. Some high quality demo MIDI files that are compatible with PianoBooster are available in doc/courses/*/ directories.

The MIDI input device is used to connect your piano keyboard to the PC. First ensure that your piano keyboard is connected up to the PC using a MIDI USB adaptor (or through a PC sound card). Once the Piano Booster application starts up you must first setup the midi input and midi output interface from the Setup menu. Next open a midi file ".mid" or a karaoke ".kar" file using File/Open from the Piano Booster menu. Now choose the skill level, if you want to just listen to the midi music - select 'listen', to play along with a midi keyboard with the music following your playing - select 'follow you'. Finally click on the Play icon to start.

It is recommended that you shut down all other programs while running Piano Booster so that the scrolling notes move smoothly across the screen.

PianoBooster isn't translated in your language? Help us, and we will gladly ship new translations with it.

Piano Booster is fully copyrighted by the author and all rights are reserved.

PianoBooster is free software (Open Source software): you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

PianoBooster is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License in the file "gplv3.txt" or from the web site http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ or gplv3.txt.

The Piano Booster Documentation and Music are released under the Creative Commons License (CC-BY).

PianoBooster License

Download and uncompress the archive file below and then follow the instructions in the BUILD.md file.

PianoBooster releases

As part of GNU General Public License the source code for PianoBooster is available from the GitHub site https://github.com/captnfab/PianoBooster. See the BUILD.md for instructions on how to build the source code.

To get a backtrace, build Piano Booster with DEBUG option

type:

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .

type:

gdb ./pianobooster

then:

run

then:

bt

Documentation

Changelog

Issues

PianoBooster is community developing project since 2018. You're welcome with patches:

Pull Requests

We have many issues always.

We are looking for musicians to make music for pianobooster. It can be educational courses or other melodies: music sources. For more information look at README.md and faq.md.

We support Linux, BSD Unix and Windows platforms. We do not have macOS developers at the moment.