Boost your Piano playing skills with PianoBooster 0.6.4 - Linux-audio-user

1 Dec 2009

Version 0.6.4 of Piano Booster has just been released.

Piano Booster is an Open Source program that helps with playing the piano and
learning to sight read music. It's key feature is that it listens and follows
what you are playing on the piano and waits for you to find and play the right
notes. It helps you with this by giving you audio feed back. So if you play a
wrong note then that note will have the Harpsichord sound but the right notes
will have the Piano sound.

For screen shots see:

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

And for a video demonstration see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGbfm8Tv-20

This versions fixes a number of issues with CPU usage and timing
accuracy and so
I recommend that everyone upgrades to this version. Users of Intel
graphic chips
please see the note at the end of this posting.

Detailed list of changes in this release 0.6.4 are:
- Added note names for beginners (to be used with a piano key note labels)
- Added assignable left and right midi channels.
- Improved MIDI timing accuracy.
- Greatly reduced the memory footprint.
- Reduced the CPU load.
- Reduced the screen flicker (recommend setting the screen refresh rate to 60Hz
     and for Intel Graphic chips updating the drivers).
- Added keyboard short-cuts. These are - speed up/down, play from start,
     play/pause, next previous song, left right both hands.
- Remembers the song settings in a configuration file called "pb.cfg".
     these are the midi channels, speed, left right or both hands.
- Now works well Ubuntu 9.10 and Intel graphic chips.
    (Those with Ubuntu 9.04 and Intel should upgrade to 9.10 and this version)
- Fixed various start up issues.
- Now correctly notates repeated accidentals that occur in a single bar.
- Added the option to display courtesy accidentals.
- Added a simple help page.
- Added an installer for windows.
- 'make install' now works on Linux.
- Now works with small screens eg an EEE-701 (for Trev)

NOTE: If you have Intel graphic chips in your computer or laptop then
this causes
severe problems when using Ubuntu 9.04. The problem is due the Intel
graphic drivers
drivers having very poor performance. They performed much worse than
on the previous
Ubuntu 8.10. The solution is to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10, PianoBooster
works particularly
well on this version.

PianoBooster is licensed under GPL and runs on Linux, Windows and the Mac.

PianoBooster is available from:   http://pianobooster.sourceforge.net.

Louis B.