EDIT: NOW IN SHOWCASE
A music student (oboist) wanted an easy way to play a note to use as a reference. We were in agreement that the best thing to do is to play the pitch and hold it in memory and use your ears/pitch sense to compare that with what you are playing on your instrument, not rely on a visual guide (as with commercial tuners).
The student didn’t want to buy a keyboard to accomplish this simple task. So I made a little program. Requires Java 8. To play a note, click on it with the mouse (hold mouse press down for sustain).
It’s mostly made from parts of other things I’ve been working on. I thought I might post it on itch.io as a freebie. But before doing so, I thought I’d run it by JGO members. Any suggestions or feedback?
Download jar: Reference Note Keyboard
To be clear, it’s not really meant for doing anything else, like playing melodies. I suppose it might be possible to make the typing keys play notes, but I’d have to solve at least one issue first: holding down a key (like spacebar or a letter) seems to retrigger it, as far as the JavaFX keyboard listener is concerned. This in turn seems to really gum up the JavaFX thread used for the GUI and disrupts audio playback.
Also, the latency could be lower for a “real” keyboard, although, it is true that the virtual playback tool for the NativeInstruments FM8 is pretty laggy, too.
Thanks!