Piano Star

Woke up today with a great idea for a piano learning application. A program that would display songs in a format that is familiar to me, guitar hero. My plan was to make a scrolling music application written in C++ that would take xls files as input and display note names on each bar. I am not much with OpenGL/DirectX programming, so I would need help. It then dawned on me to search sourceforge for a similar application already in development and offer my help. I found one, Synthesia.

Synthesia completely blows me away. Does everything I wanted and takes a huge step forward by using MIDI files, making it compatable with thousands of free songs. It even connects to your USB or MIDI keyboard for input and “scoring”. It also has a practive mode that will pause the scrolling waiting for you to hit the correct notes.

I am saddened that the project is currently closed source. The only help accepted is from a user’s perspective; bug reports, feature requests, etc…