Support for "Piano Maestro" USB led strip

Synthesia is a living project. You can help by sharing your ideas.
Search the forum before posting your idea. :D

No explicit, hateful, or hurtful language. Nothing illegal.
Post Reply
picus
Posts: 1

Post by picus »

Hello, Congratulations!
I-m loving your synthesia software so far! (and of course my daughter who was the target audience in the fist place)
Theres is an interesting product that promises to light up leds in a strip that you paste over the piano keybord, while the software is playing MIDI files for you.
I found it at:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/05/ ... u-to-play/
This product, I think, is for most of us that don't own a light-enabled-keyboard piano, such as the ones that synthesia already supports (great idea).
I know is may be too much to ask but, may be you could either research with the inventor of this product or partner with him in order to give support for this product as well.
That would be a great feature and would have me and other users buying this led strip.
Thanks!
Lemo
Posts: 313

Post by Lemo »

Their product home page is quite hilarious
Loved the Suggested Retail Price vs Special Introductory Price and super scientific learning graph
Not the mention the 170$ tag for ... only 48 leds while the whole page features 88 keys keyboards
Good thing Nicholas got better tastes in home pages

I would not get this if I were you
A lot cheaper option would be to grab an Arduino and make your own LED strip
Your daughter would have learned both the piano and a bit of electronics
Stuff & experiments for Synthesia: Gramp v0.2SkinboxFireSynthVideoWebradio
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Those long testimonial pages do kind of creep me out a little...

While I agree with Lemo ($170 is basically the price of an entire lighted keyboard with 61-keys), to answer your original question I would imagine Synthesia should already work just fine with the device. Though, because Synthesia doesn't support multiple output devices (yet!) you could use something like MIDI-OX to route Synthesia's output to your MIDI keyboard and the light strip.

Still, if it's just lighting the lights based on standard Note On messages, it should work with Synthesia without a problem.
JohnWerner
Posts: 2

Post by JohnWerner »

I realize this thread is a little old, but I thought I'd post just in case anyone is considering buying PianoMaestro.

I recently bought one and, unfortunately, it does not work with Synthesia. It is proprietary and is seen as a Human Interface Device, at least on Windows. So it does not appear as an option for output in Synthesia, and there's no way to route MIDI signals to it as far as I know.

Luckily(?), I didn't buy it for the sole purpose of using with Synthesia. My plan was to use it to visualize chords or scales across the keyboard, and I think I can get it to do that with the software they provide.

However, I have to say I'm not very impressed with the device. It's not a high quality device, and the software is pretty shoddy as well. I've played around with Arduino before, and I have to agree with the posts above. You could definitely make something just as good yourself, and for less money. Plus you could easily get it to respond to MIDI with the Arduino libraries.

I am seriously considering returning it.

John
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Thanks for your review. I've been curious since I'd heard about it whether it measures up. Strange that they went the generic HID route. I've seen a couple roll-up keyboards that did the same and all they're really doing is hurting themselves. In an ecosystem where every piece of software supports MIDI, it doesn't really make sense to create a piece of hardware that doesn't. Oh well.
Post Reply