What is Reddit's opinion of Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

It's not really a talent, all it takes is some ear training. I don't think you can learn it in few days but in the long run your music will benefit from two months training.

For now, just fire up some virtual piano or virtual bass on your computer and practice along. At the very least you'll learn song structure and dynamics.

I did a bit of research. Maybe this will do what you need:

Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard

>The alphanumeric keyboard mapping can be configured from inside the program using the GUI interface, and the settings are stored in XML files. Some maps for Spanish, German and French keyboard layouts are provided, translated from the ones provided by VKeybd.
>
>VMPK can send program changes and controllers to a MIDI synth. The definitions for different standards and devices can be provided as .INS files, the same format used by QTractor and TSE3. It was developed by Cakewalk and used also in Sonar.

That's from the website, so yeah it can send controllers.

I’m pretty sure the DAWs i mentioned have musical typing. I’m a Logic user and it does. Check out this thing http://vmpk.sourceforge.net/ .

I never used it but it is a tool to make your keyboard work as a midi keyboard. It doesn’t have any sound in itself but supposedly it works on instrument vsts. Hope this helps ✌️

It's a little difficult to figure out what you're looking for. Do you want it to ba a computer keyboard that's dedicated to playing midi signals there are programs dedicated to the task such as:

http://vmpk.sourceforge.net/

Or, there are a number of midi controllers that are approximately the size of a computer keyboard. I have the Akai MPK mini, I like it but there are many similar controllers made by Alesis, M-Audio, and Korg has a nanokey that's really small and portable. I had one of the original nanokeys but it stopped working after a few years, but honestly that was my fault, years of abuse using it at gigs.

Finally there's the CREATIVE Prodikeys, it's a combination computer keyboard/midi controller but it's discontinued and I'm not sure there's anything like it. There are some that show up on e-Bay though.

I hope in this long winded reply I've been able to lend some assistance. I hope you can find what you're looking for, good hunting!

Well, at least it seems that the program recognizes your controller, and lists two ports as readable and one as writable. I suppose that you installed v0.7.2 (the latest). If the last version is not available in your distro, please download the AppImage from Sourceforge.

In the configuration dialog (Edit->Preferences), please select 61 keys (to match the number of keys with your keyboard). In the MIDI Connections dialog, check every checkboxes. Enable MIDI Thru on MIDI output is the most important. In MIDI Out driver/connection choose SonivoxEAS or Fluidsynth, whatever that produces sound when clicking with the mouse over the keys. With MIDI IN driver set to ALSA (forget about the other options for now), try both Input MIDI Connections "Impact GC61:0" and "Impact GC61:1". Which one produces sound? Now about the visual feedback (highlighting the keys in VMPK while you play your controller): you need to choose the same MIDI Channel (1-16) on your controller as in VMPK. It is in the main window, next to the "panic" button. Your controller probably has also a way to setup the MIDI channel number. One way to see which MIDI channel your controller is using would be to capture some events with the "aseqdump" utility.

You could use a virtual midi keyboard. This would allow you to have HID keyboard (like you type on) to act like a MIDI keyboard (like you play music on). You can also use an Arduino as an HID device. This would allow you to use stompable buttons in your keyboard.

Great -- I hope it can be useful. I tried testing it with this program: http://vmpk.sourceforge.net/ which claims to be cross-platform, but it kept crashing on my Mac, regardless of whether keyboard was plugged in or I mouse-clicked on the on-screen keyboard.

Good luck!

> Only 6 xruns?

I'm sorry, I don't understand this question. Care to elaborate ?

> Music on linux still seems impossible for me :(

It took me some time and effort to piece it all together.

However, it boils down to the following. You need three things :

• A keyboard
• A synthesizer
• A bunch of "cables" to connect the keyboard to the synth, then the synth to the sound card

The keyboard does not produce any sound by itself, it's just the user interface. Shown here is VMPK.

There are quite a few synths available out there. For a quick start I'd recommend Hexter

Then to patch everything together : QJackCtl

All of those are readily available in the Ubuntu repos.

Enjoy !