[Greg Gant]

This defies catagorie, its really one of the first and only Music games for the Mac.

http://www.halitestu.../pianohero.aspx

Just released for OS X (UB) as of Yesterday. It uses Midi files to play a basic "Piano" Hero. I just got done with a few rounds. Certainly takes some time to adjust reading music as falling notes. This one belongs in the IMG news.

[maccer]

Great tip! This is a kind of "Hero" style music game that I have wanted for some time now! A great tool for learning to play the computer music tunes properly!

As you can read on the home page, the game was actually called "Piano Hero" earlier, but the developer got a cease-and-desist-letter from Activision, who own the Guitar Hero trademark.

Now I just need to fix some space so that I can connect my Macbook Pro to my Yamaha PSR-740 and start playing!

[XxtraLarGe]

This looks really cool. It's ridiculous that Activision sent them C & D letter to stop using the name Piano Hero.

[the Battle Cat]

This topic probably best belongs in the Arcade forum from the looks of the screens and game play, but please, do not post topics about individual games in the General forum. I might add "Educational" to this sub as it's a better fit for that.

[Greg Gant]

Bah, just trying to give this game the exposure it does. I figure nearly 6 years should give me some sort of leeway... youngin'

[rogue]

Actually, the reason for the C&D is that Activision is actively developing a Piano Hero game and already has the name registered.

[maccer]

I just sent the developer some suggestions (see below) and added a suggestion for a "training mode" interface:




------ A training mode ------
There should be a training mode where you can practice the hard parts. Some helpful functions are listed below.

-- Rewind and Fast Forward.
This could be done in several ways, either by keys or the mouse. When using keys, it should be possible not only to use the computer keyboard, but also to map a specified key/button/knob on the MIDI keyboard for doing the rewinding. That way you could concentrate fully at playing without having to continually reach for the keyboard.
1. Hold down a key to rewind the music. The rewind tempo should increase the longer the key is hold down
2. Tap a key which makes the song jumps back, say, 5 seconds a time.

-- A Loop region that allows you to train on a specified part of the song multiple times in a row. This would probably be easiest to select using the mouse. I attach a image with a proposed mouse-driven interface. It's kind of a Logic rip-off :-)


------ Pitch change ------
Many songs would become more easier to play (ie. mostly white keys are used) if the pitch could be changed up/down a few notes. A pitch control is included in the attached image.

It might also be useful to be able to change the octave of the individual parts played if one doesn't have a full-sized piano/keyboard.


------ Difficulty levels ------
It would be nice to be able to choose from several difficulty levels. The game music that is currently included is a bit too hard to play (for me at least :-) ) – there are too many notes per hand to keep track of. The difficulty levels for the right/left hand should be independent of each other – that way you can become more advanced with the right hand while learning a easy variant of the left hand.

-- One way might be to be able to split the right/left hand parts into several MIDI tracks. The MIDI tacks could be named in a certain way. For example:

anyTrackname_easy
anyTracknamey_medium
anyTrackname_hard

These could then be used in several ways to achieve the difficulty levels.

One way is to have each track contain (mostly) single notes that are added together when the difficulty increases. For example, the medium difficulty would add the notes from the easy and medium track.

Or one could simply have separate easy/medium/hard tracks so that the notes are not added together, but one of the tracks are played depending on the difficulty setting.


-- Another way would of course be to have separate MIDI files for separate difficulties. But that would make it impossible to change the difficulty of the right and left hand independently.

song_name_easy.mid
song_name_medium.mod
song_name_hard.mid