
INTRODUCTION
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.
WINDOWS
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.
Double Click on the EXE file of Windows installer for installation.
PianoBoosterInstall-0-6-4.exe (obsoleted)
macOS
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-0.6.2.dmg (obsoleted)
pianobooster-mac-0.6.5-alpha1.dmg (not official)
LINUX and BSD UNIX
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.
While there are many possible choices for the Linux (Timidity, FluidSynth), the easiest way is
to use Timidity. Timidity is BSD Unix is not workable, please use FluidSynth.
This must be started before Pianobooster, and also allows to load custom Soundfonts.
Install RPM, DEB, ARCH, TGZ etc. package.
Packages for Linux and BSD Unix are available in repositories of distributions here.
Packages for Linux (not for BSD Unix) are available in OBS repository:
pianobooster
pianobooster-timidity
pianobooster-fluidsynth
Note: The packages provided with distributions may not exist or are out of date,
in which case you will have to compile from the source code.
However compiling from source is quite easy on Linux and BSD Unix.
MIDI FILES
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.
INSTRUCTIONS
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.
TRANSLATIONS
PianoBooster isn't translated in your language? Help us, and we will gladly ship
new translations with it. Use our
Collaborative Translation Platform
(Transifex) to add your favorite languages.
Using Transifex is not mandatory.
You can translate by Pull Request.
You need to translate:
Main program
Courses
Desktop file #1
Desktop file #2
Desktop file #3
Script
Script
LICENSE
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
SOURCE CODE
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.
DEBUGGING
To get a backtrace, build Piano Booster with DEBUG option
type:
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .
type:
gdb ./pianobooster
then:
run
then:
bt
DOCUMENTATION
Documentation
Changelog
BUGTRACKER
Issues
CONTRIBUTING
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.