Virtual Piano

Just wondering if anyone has managed to get a virtual piano working reasonably well? I am having problems working out which triggers/actions to use without getting audible clicks on short audio files or unresponsive piano keys with longer ones. I think my problems are coming from the rewind action, but I could be wrong.

Hi @steve_t,

Developing a “real” virtual piano can be very complex to get natural sounds correctly linked with natural touch inputs.
Instead of trying to create it with buttons / audio / triggers & actions within IntuiFace, I’d recommend you to search for an online virtual piano that fits your needs and display it within the Web Browser Asset. Note this component will only support single touch interaction on a Windows platform.

Seb

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Agree with Seb. This is the first thing that came up for me - HTML5 Virtual Piano

@Seb - I had the same question about the short clicking that happens sometimes after an audio file plays. This usually happens on my interface sound design. Short button noises, beeps etc. Is there any known workaround for this with some special settings? It’s like the sound resets after it’s done playing but when the “playhead” goes back it plays a few milliseconds of the beginning of the sound.

Thanks for your help, but unfortunately using a browser to 3rd party branding wouldn’t be an option for this customer. I also thought about developing something in flash, but that was no good either as the interface needs to demo multi touch.

I have had some success however. I have two sets of piano note audio files. One set are 1 second long and the other set 5 seconds or more. The first set are ok sounding, the second set are a lot better.

I fixed the audio popping by converting all of the .wav files to .mp3 (just using audition batch convert).
I set the buttons to rewind when pressed and the audio files to autoplay on rewind.

This gives something that is workable. You can play both single notes as well as chords.

After testing, the 1s notes are proving to be the better option as the keyboard (piano) is much more responsive. The longer ones sound better, but they keyboard just feels a bit laggy. Im not really sure why, but it may take longer to rewind a longer note?

Anyway I will keep trying other avenues and report back if I get any further improvement.

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Thanks for the tip on converting to mp3! I will try that on a big project we’re delivering next week.

From my experience, Intuiface has quite a bit of latency to any user input. I’m guessing .25 to .5 seconds on a high end machine. My background is in music production and achieving acceptable latency (around 60 milliseconds or less) has been a big project for me over the last 20 years. (finally solved using the core audio driver on a mac or ASIO on PC)

There’s a piece of software for PC that converts QWERTY keystrokes to MIDI called Bomes Midi Translator but I don’t see how that could help unless Intuiface could send keystrokes to it. Have you considered using Intuiface to launch another application? It wouldn’t be ideal but could serve as a work around if this doesn’t necessarily have to be IN the experience window.

One more thought about going with a browser, have you considered creating a transparent PNG file that would act as a frame that would cover up all parts of the broswer except for the piano keys? (interactivity would need to be disabled on this object)

Please share your outcome here. Interested to know if there’s a solution that works.