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.

REQUIREMENTS

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 section of the PianoBooster website for possible solutions.

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 on the PianoBooster download page see:

http://pianobooster.sourceforge.net/download.html

INSTRUCTIONS

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 whilst running Piano Booster so that the scrolling notes move smoothly across the screen.

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/.

SOURCE CODE

As part of GNU General Public License the source code for PianoBooster is available from the Source Forge site http://pianobooster.sourceforge.net// See the BUILD.txt for instructions on how to build the source code.