Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Piano players, what software do you use?
5 points by ehcjrvakzjtbe 1159 days ago
what software do you use to compliment your piano playing?

i mean everything, including but not limited to: open source, closed source, free, paid, simple sheet music construction, printing, transposition, crazy machine learning score derivation from sound, massive score databases preferably within the legal realm, etc

6 comments

I have been using ForScore for a very long time. Since the iPad 1. (still works).

A neighbor used MuseScore, and Audacity is the simplest audio editor. (both open source)

IMSLP works for scores off copyright. But TBH, you can find scores in thrift stores for pennies, and from the usual stores when you need something like MusicMinusOne (printed score plus orchestral audio less piano or other instrument ... namely YOU) or other copyrighted work. You may get something different than what you ordered. I got one MusicMinusOne with an online key to download the audio rather than a CD like my earlier ones. I go back to cassette and vinyl in that regard.

A LOT of scores are poorly scanned. Light and dark pages, some pages are crooked. The best solution I've found is simply to "crop" each offending page inside ForScore. Crop also means rotate. If the edits are few, I split the PDF, make edits and merge the image files (apps on MacOS).

Would be much nicer if people scanned stuff straight, and with appropriate lighting and contrast.

Probably not exactly what you're thinking, but here's my stuff:

I used lilypond to typeset a lot of music, and then python scripts to chop them up so that I could overlay it on some videos of my own playing.

I have used Manim to create animations to go along with some music instruction videos that I'm creating.

I have created my own back/forward pedal to control a slideshow while playing the piano (using 2 arduinos, 1 in the pedal and another at the computer for wireless communication).

I used PHP to generate keyboard images from chord descriptions many years ago.

Use IMSLP as a music resource. Also, Google books (https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=hymnal&tbs=,bk...).

Probably not what you meant, but pianote.com is fantastic for learning. I'm rocketing through lessons and I didn't even know for sure which keys were which when I started 3 months ago.
demucs (from facebook research) for splitting audio track.
MuseScore and Tempo (metronome).
I'm using flowkey