Synthesia - Piano for Everyone

Visit http://www.synthesiagame.com/ for more information.

The Synthesia Learning Pack is included in the game and doesn't require a
separate download. Click the Learning Pack button on the menu to try it out.
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Synthesia has primarily been created by Nicholas Piegdon.
The following people have also contributed:
- David Scott: Instrument icons on the Track Selection screen
- tommai78101 from the forums: top-of-keyboard percussion icons
- L. Peter Deutsch: MD5 algorithm implementation
- Dave Ray: STRING/WSTRING macro
- NeHe Productions: OpenGL base code
- Christian Auby: input octave shifting code
- Luis Anton: early version of the MIDI input code
- Daniel Lawrence: the name Synthesia
- Many others with ideas in email and in the Synthesia Talk forums
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Synthesia uses the FreeImage image library. See freeimage.sourceforge.net for
details. FreeImage is used under the FIPL, version 1.0.
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The user interface icons are licensed from the Fugue and Diagona Icon sets
under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license:
Copyright (C) 2007-2009 Yusuke Kamiyamane. All rights reserved.
http://www.pinvoke.com/
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The music in the "G Major Music" folder comes from Gilbert DeBenedetti's
G Major Music Theory website. Find more at www.gmajormusictheory.org
All of the pieces were split into two-track MIDI files by Choul, Rickeeey,
and TieDyeGuy from the Synthesia Talk forums.
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Synthesia's video game music samples are provided by Game Music Themes.
Visit http://www.gamemusicthemes.com/ for high quality piano MIDI and sheets.
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Keyboard Setup screen preview music is Fugue in G Minor KV 154/385k, composed
by W. A. Mozart, courtesy of the Mutopia Project. www.mutopiaproject.org
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Change Log
"(LP)" denotes features available in the Learning Pack

Version 0.7.1 - 05/2010

-----------------------
NEW: Song Bookmarks. Click "Edit Bookmarks" button and then click in the left
margin of the falling notes. Use the buttons to navigate.
NEW: You can now click the on-screen keyboard to play notes that may be outside
the range of your input device. This is fun on a touch-screen.
NEW: Added speed and song position controls to playing screen.
NEW: Song timeline is now clickable to navigate song.
NEW: The sustain pedal can now be used while playing. It will hold notes
"open" in the falling note display longer.
NEW: Added helpful tooltip messages while hovering over certain UI elements.
NEW: Added "HKCU/Software/Synthesia/FPS Limit" string key. Set to an integer
to prevent the game from rendering more than that number of frames per
second. This is especially good at reducing CPU usage.
NEW: You can now mouse-wheel scroll through the song while it's paused.
NEW: Option to import "markers" stored in MIDI files as song bookmarks.
NEW: Unknown crashes in Windows now produce a mini-dump on the desktop.
NEW: Option under 'Advanced' (in OS X only) to ignore leading NULL bytes in
device input. This may improve compatibility with certain MIDI adapters.
NEW: Installer option to add a "Send To" right-click item to "Synthesia Music"
CHG: Synthesia is now built against the Feb-2010 version of DirectX.
CHG: The options screen will now fill any available screen height.
CHG: (LP) Sheet music notes will now be placed on the "correct" staff much
more often based on the rest of the notes in that track.
CHG: (LP) In practice mode, "Played Automatically" that start at the same time
as a "You Play" note will no longer sound until you hit your notes first.
CHG: Instead of single-letter searching in the Song Library, you can now
continue typing to search for complete song names.
CHG: Page-up and page-down can now be used to page through the Song Library.
CHG: In the Song Library pressing enter just after a new song is selected (and
still loading) will jump to the next screen when loading is complete.
CHG: "Fixed Do Note Names" are now referred to as "'Do Re Mi' Note Names".
CHG: You can now start songs (first time only) by playing any note.
only) by pressing any note on your keyboard in addition to space bar.
CHG: Improved the "X songs found" visual cue on the Add Watched Folder screen.
CHG: Updated 3 more of the songs in the Harder folder to have split left and
right hand parts. (Thanks again Choul, Rickeeey, and TieDyeGuy!)
FIX: Added a short delay between successive song previews on the Song Library
screen. Previewing too quickly sent device resets faster than some
devices were able to handle.
FIX: Corrected some drawing artifacts that occurred with ATI cards in DirectX.
FIX: Scores above 1M will no longer show in scientific notation.
FIX: All non-note events in You Play tracks are now passed through to the
output device. (Before only program change messages were.)
FIX: Right-click "View in Synthesia" association now sets percussion tracks to
"Played But Hidden" instead of "Played Automatically".
FIX: The song length was being calculated incorrectly in some rare cases. This
led to the game stopping before the final notes were finished sounding.
FIX: Attempt to overcome errors while loading bad events in MIDI files.
FIX: Show text even when 'Trebuchet MS' font isn't installed (under Windows).
FIX: Selections in lists will now always appear fully on-screen.
FIX: Adding a CD or USB drive as a watched folder will no longer cause a crash
when there is no CD in the drive or the USB device is removed.
FIX: Number of special folders/drives shown on the Add Watched Folder screen is
now limited to the first nine found.
FIX: Stopped text and texture flicker at the first frame of every screen.
FIX: Prevent multiple instances from running concurrently.
FIX: The entire keyboard is now shown (without shading) when no tracks are set
to 'You Play' regardless of selected input device.
FIX: Always show Practice Mode button, even if no tracks are set to "You Play"
mode. That way the rhythm/practice setting doesn't reset on you.
FIX: Clicks from tablet/pen devices are now handled correctly again.

Version 0.7.0 - 09/2009

-----------------------
NEW: (LP) The sheet music view now contains rests.
NEW: (LP) Practice mode scoring.
NEW: (LP) Added option to toggle "concurrent chord notes" in practice mode.
NEW: (LP) Added option to toggle the "next note" markers in practice mode.
NEW: (LP) Added option to display English note names in rainbow colors.
NEW: (LP) Added option to toggle constant-speed song scrolling by adding
extra space between notes.
NEW: (LP) Added measure numbers to falling-note-display measure lines.
NEW: (LP) Add a string key named "HKCU/Software/Synthesia/Fixed Do Note Names"
and set its value to a set of 12 names all separated by exactly one
space to override the default Anglo-Saxon Solfege names. For reference
the default is: "Do Di Re Ri Mi Fa Fi Sol Si La Li Ti". Currently, this
will not work with non-ASCII values.
NEW: Built-in "Song Library" with "Watched Folder" list, auto-preview, and
rating/difficult controls. The old "File Open" boxes have been removed.
NEW: Instrument icons on the track selection screen.
NEW: Synthesia can now read and make use of additional metadata provided by
.synthesia metadata files. There is a free editor. See the open-source
project at: http://code.google.com/p/synthesia-metadata-gui/
NEW: Added 26 new songs, updated 109 to split the left and right tracks.
(Thanks Choul, Rickeeey, and TieDyeGuy from the forums!)
NEW: New graphics littering the interface.
NEW: While using a Learning Pack demo song various animated cues will appear
on certain screens, highlighting Learning Pack features.
NEW: Keyboard setup screen with fun preview areas.
NEW: Percussion icons if a percussion track is set to "You Play". Can also
be set to always-on from the options screen.
NEW: Windows command-line options. Type "Synthesia.exe --help" to see them.
NEW: Windowed mode (Win32 OpenGL only) via command-line.
NEW: Press F5 during gameplay to toggle hiding all notes and sheet music.
NEW: Hold the tab key to adjust the speed by 1% at a time instead of 10%.
NEW: Number of note "errors" is now shown during play.
NEW: Added quit button to gameplay screen so you can interact mouse-only.
NEW: Huge overhaul in the font rendering portion of both graphics back-ends,
as well as some new much-needed flexibility in texture loading.
NEW: Added "Note Window Length" and "Note Window Length After First" settings
to fiddle with the input window that controls which notes are considered
part of the same "concurrent chord notes" or not. The values are in
microseconds. The defaults are 165000 and 95000.
CHG: (LP) Note labels have been moved to the "head" of notes and had their
readability improved by adding a contrasting background.
CHG: (LP) The performance of Key/Note labels has been improved dramatically.
CHG: (LP) Note labels should no longer appear "jumpy".
CHG: (LP) Added two new Learning Pack demo songs.
CHG: Title screen update.
CHG: Improved the beginning-of-gameplay keyboard shortcut graphic.
CHG: Input is no longer muted on score screen, play settings screen, or while
the game is paused.
CHG: The score screen has been significantly revamped.
CHG: The size of the sheet music display is now saved between songs.
CHG: Duplicate scores on the scoreboard will now be ranked the same. So, the
following scores would be ranked #1, #1, #2: 200 200 195.
CHG: Removed startup "device list open test", obsoleting the need for the
"Skip Device Open Test" registry setting.
CHG: Don't show empty slots on the scoreboard.
CHG: Allow MIDI Type-0 files containing more than one track. They're surely
non-conforming, but we may still be able to load it.
CHG: The log file now includes date/time for every entry.
CHG: Made the title screen device input preview box always-on.
CHG: Added a silly particle burst effect when Learning Pack key is pasted.
FIX: (LP) In rare cases, spacing in the sheet music display may have been
incorrect so a note would sound before/after the cursor was directly
hovering over it. All notes are now placed in the correct position.
FIX: Very short filenames no longer cause a crash.
FIX: Mac device input drivers that sometimes report more than one event at the
same timestamp will now be handled correctly.
FIX: Crash after opening 255 songs fixed.
FIX: Channels that are re-used later in a song with a different instrument now
no longer prematurely send the later-used instrument change message.
FIX: Unicode characters in names shown on the Learning Pack display correctly.
FIX: Made the file association option in the installer work in Windows Vista.
FIX: Don't crash if the track settings or saved scores become corrupt.
FIX: Switching input devices after playing a song using the software keyboard
will no longer cause the software keyboard's octave shift to be applied
to the new input device.
FIX: Attempt to prevent screensaver and monitor power-off events in Windows.
FIX: If the DirectX renderer has trouble, causing the game not to start, switch
to the OpenGL renderer for the next run.
FIX: Note blocks for multiple Note-Ons for the same note on the same channel
are now displayed correctly.
FIX: MIDI Meta events that arrive from input devices will no longer cause
a program crash. They are still reported in the extended (F7) log output.
FIX: Added option to relax output device reset (so it doesn't perform a full
device close/re-open). Set the following string key to a value of "1":
"HKCU\Software\Synthesia\Disallow Hard Device Reset".
FIX: Cleaned up a really old bug that caused new, never-opened songs to inherit
the track settings from the previously-opened song (vs. getting assigned a
default set of track settings).

Version 0.6.5 - 09/2008

-----------------------
NEW: (LP) Note Labels option on the Play Settings screen.
NEW: (LP) Resize sheet music display with F3 or by dragging border with mouse.
NEW: (LP) Name of the current song key displayed down in status area.
NEW: 120+ new songs from gmajormusictheory.org included in the release.
NEW: Added a marker to the "middle C" keyboard key.
NEW: Mouse auto-fade after a few seconds of no movement.
NEW: Pause/Resume button in the bottom right corner of the gameplay screen.
NEW: Enhanced the keyboard display with a red strip of felt.
CHG: Changed the appearance of various windows and buttons a little.
CHG: Pushed MIDI output to a separate thread, which should improve performance.
CHG: Game startup should be a little faster when loading large songs.
CHG: Toggle "Full Debug Output" with F7. If you're running into a repeatable
problem, it may be useful to run the game with full debug output on before
sending me the log from the run containing the problem.
FIX: Notes from "You Play" tracks should always appear above other notes.
FIX: Practice mode "next note" markers no longer appear at staggered times
when more than one note exists at the same time.
FIX: Practice mode "next note" markers are now always removed properly when
rewinding at low speeds.
FIX: Controller, after-touch, and pitch bend events are no longer sent to
the output device for "You Play" tracks.
FIX: Notes can no longer be skipped in practice mode at high speeds.
FIX: The "next note" marker is now shown for all notes that can be hit while
 waiting for user input, not just notes directly on the line.
FIX: Track selection boxes can not longer run off the bottom of the screen.
FIX: Sheet music button on track selection screen is much easier to see now.
FIX: Practice mode can no longer be selected when no tracks have been set
to "You Play" mode. A helpful message is indicated instead.

Version 0.6.4 - 06/2008

-----------------------
NEW: (LP) Sheet music display with scrolling and page-flip progression modes.
NEW: (LP) Practice mode that waits for you to hit the right notes.
NEW: (LP) Measure lines in falling note display. (Toggle with F4.)
NEW: (LP) Learning Pack key entry screen (off the main menu) with four "demo"
songs that temporarily unlock all the new features.
NEW: Added "Play Settings" screen to handle the growing set of song options.
NEW: Added option to lock keyboard height to conserve screen space for notes.
CHG: Game continues to play in the background if alt-tabbed or minimized.
CHG: Added the old "Notes played" statistic to the playing screen (from 0.4.0).
CHG: Made "Play all user input" the default behavior.
CHG: Changed the vertical-guide layout for falling notes.
CHG: Added option to disable auto-"System MIDI volume" adjust in Windows.
FIX: Bounded max size of praise/combo text.
FIX: Removed un-openable MIDI input/output devices from device lists. (However,
this requires a quick "open" test on each device at startup. Some devices
can take a very long time (>30s) to open. So, the open test can be turned
off via the "HKCU\Software\Synthesia\Skip Device Open Test" string key set
to a value of "1".
FIX: Don't crash while FF'ing an event heavy song with certain output devices.
FIX: Caps-lock no longer affects octave shifting keys.
FIX: Windows installer now includes DirectX redistributable, so no more missing
DLL errors. Stand-alone zip users should run directx_redist/DXSETUP.exe.

Version 0.6.3 - 01/2008

-----------------------
NEW: Keyboard zoom options (on the Track Selection screen).
NEW: Options screen:
- Play all user input / Play only correct user input.
- Default track mode: Played Automatically / Played But Hidden.
- Play notes using velocity from the: song / user input.
- Toggle sparks for performance.
- Toggle ignore SysEx messages.
- Toggle bank select fix.
- Toggle renderer backend in Windows.
NEW: DirectX rendering backend.
NEW: Better looking white keys.
NEW: Highest score for current settings shown on track selection screen.
NEW: Software mouse cursor.
NEW: Copy error text to clipboard before exiting.
NEW: Added an easter egg somewhere. Try and find it!
NEW: Added log. Found in "Application Data\Synthesia\log.txt"
CHG: Note scoring is now additionally based on timing accuracy.
CHG: Split all remaining "Various" tracks into single-instrument tracks.
FIX: Sometimes first note of "You Play" track would use wrong instrument.
FIX: Caps-lock no longer affects the software keyboard.
FIX: Windows crash from attempting to send output to a MIDI device too fast.
FIX: Made MIDI output reset stronger in Windows, to avoid locked-"on" notes.
FIX: Events using running status after a meta event weren't loaded correctly.
Version 0.6.2a - 09/2007
------------------------
NEW: Files with .kar extensions are now supported.
NEW: "You Play, Muted" track mode.
CHG: Renamed "stray notes" to "extra notes" and made them break the combo.
FIX: Only reset the MIDI output device after playing something through it.
(In some cases, a reset takes upwards of one second. This reduces
how often that time hit occurs.)
FIX: Program change and channel pressure events are now sent correctly when
using an external output device on the Mac.

Version 0.6.2 - 08/2007

-----------------------
NEW: High score list per-song, per-track-configuration.
NEW: Tracks that use more than one MIDI channel are now split into one-track-
per-channel. This makes almost every format-0 and even some format-1
songs MUCH more playable.
NEW: Fast-forward and Rewind. Press the left/right arrows to jog the song.
NEW: Software Keyboard. Tries to guess the best starting octave to shift to
based on the average location of all notes in "You Play" tracks.
NEW: Sparkle effect while holding down keys correctly
NEW: Track settings are remembered across game sessions
NEW: "Visible Only" track mode.
NEW: Mac version fades between the game and the desktop on start and quit.
NEW: Fade transition between screens.
NEW: You can override the window size with registry/plist string settings
named "Window Width" and "Window Height". Use whatever number you want
in either string setting.
CHG: Gameplay starts out paused so you can get your bearings on input.
CHG: The software license Synthesia is released under has changed. It is no
longer the open-source MIT license, but rather a proprietary closed-
source license. No worries, the game is still free.
CHG: New keyboard mapping: view stretch is PgUp/PgDn, Speed is Up/Down.
CHG: Track selection screen is now sorted left-to-right by average note pitch.
CHG: Remember view stretch between multiple tries of the same song.
CHG: Remember octave offset between multiple tries of the same song.
CHG: Possible track modes are based on whether input and output devices have
been selected. e.g. "You Play" won't be available when input is disabled.
CHG: The falling note display runs much smoother (especially at low speeds).
FIX: SysEx MIDI messages in songs are now sent to output devices.
FIX: File Open dialog no longer pops under the game window in Windows Vista.
FIX: Bank Select events sometimes cause tracks not to play in Vista and Mac.
Now on those platforms, bank select messages have been disabled. If this
causes problems, set a "Disallow Bank Select Fix" string in the registry
or plist to anything other than "0" to stop the special behavior.
FIX: Pausing the game while holding keys down caused sound (in "You Play"
tracks) and key images to "stick" after resuming gameplay.
FIX: Removed (poorly written, first-attempt at) multi-monitor OpenGL code to
fix a crash for many users.

Version 0.6.1 - 05/2007

-----------------------
NEW: On the Mac, output to external devices is now available.
NEW: On the Mac, you can now drag a MIDI file to the application on the Dock or
in Finder or right click a MIDI file and choosing "Open With..." to open.
NEW: In Windows, added a low-tech solution to choose between different monitors
connected to the SAME video card (doesn't work in multi-video-card
situations.) (Set the string key HKCU\Software\Synthesia\Monitor to "0"
 for primary monitory, "1" for secondary, etc.)
CHG: Mac OpenGL display now has v-sync enabled.
CHG: Mac game window is now much less obtrusive. Other windows are allowed to
be on top and the Dock and Application bar can both be made visible by
hovering the mouse over there positions for a second or so. The game
window also no longer must be hidden during file selection or error boxes.
FIX: In Windows, MIDI SysEx messages in input are no longer flagged as errors.
FIX: On the Mac, fixed MIDI that used RPN / NRPN controller events (e.g. to
set pitch bend) so they're now handled correctly.
FIX: On the Mac, output devices are now reset much harder than before, so
output device internal state that may be set by one song isn't carried
over to another.
FIX: On the Mac, there was a potential problem with some input devices that
might send bursts of events all at once. Previously, only the first
event in the incoming list of events was recognized. Now, any number of
incoming events will be recognized correctly.
FIX: Picked a font for the Mac version to use that is actually a default
system font. (Apparently "Palatino" only ships with iLife now.)
FIX: On the Mac, fixed a problem where the (modal!) file open dialog could
be hidden underneath the game window, leaving you not choice but to force-
quit the program.
FIX: Disabled OpenGL depth testing to fix a problem where text would sometimes
not appear above other controls (TrackBox, SongBox, etc.) in Windows.
FIX: Score state now displays correctly at low resolutions (like 800x600).
FIX: Title bar no longer pops when changing speed at the beginning of gameplay.
FIX: Text centering and placement on the Mac is now properly implemented.
FIX: MIDI files with non-all-lowercase file extensions can now be selected
in the File Open dialog box.

Version 0.6.0 - 04/2007

-----------------------
NEW: Mac Version!
NEW: All new note and keyboard graphics!
NEW: All new menu graphics.
NEW: Right-click association option in installer.
CHG: Renamed and rebranded the project to "Synthesia"
CHG: Switched from base 2D OS drawing to 3D accelerated OpenGL drawing.
CHG: Moved status display to the bottom of the screen during play.
CHG: Made default music folder less imposing. Now the game will only default
to the directory the very first run. Afterwards, it will remember the
last file you attempted to play (like it used to).
CHG: Improved exception handling.
FIX: Don't crash if "Synthesia Music" folder doesn't exist.
FIX: No more crash sometimes when app regains focus on the title screen.

Version 0.5.1 - 02/2007

-----------------------
NEW: Your notes are played (in the correct instrument for the track)
NEW: Tooltips on all menu controls and settings.
NEW: 10 Sample songs from Game Music Themes.
NEW: "Stray Notes" metric on stats screen
NEW: "Average Speed" metric on stats screen
NEW: Box around MIDI input test on title screen
NEW: Combo counter and much improved stats display during play.
CHG: Improved Klavarskribo staff notation.
CHG: Match input to closest unplayed note's opportunity window center instead
of matching against the first available unplayed note.
CHG: Swapped blue and yellow in the track color order, making blue the new
 "first" color.
CHG: ReasonableSynthVolume object replaces MidiCommOut::SetReasonableSynthVol
and now works for all mixers in the system instead of only the first.
CHG: Darkened the border for a few different colors to increase the contrast
between sharp/flat notes in a series.
CHG: Default to new "Piano Hero Music" folder at startup. (User configurable
in the future.)
FIX: Disabled MIDI input while game is paused to prevent cheating.
FIX: Made MidiCommOut::Reset() actually reset everything by fully closing and
reopening the device. midiOutReset() apparently only turns off the keys
and pedals on each track. It *doesn't* reset patches or volume.
FIX: Reworked MIDI engine to correct a sync/lag issue in songs that started
with a considerable delay before the first note.
FIX: Notes don't draw on top of keys anymore.
FIX: MIDI track default color order is now consistent for all files.
FIX: Two tracks with identical notes would cause the "second" track's note to
not appear. This normally would not matter, as they overlap completely,
but when hiding the first track, the second note would not show.

Version 0.5.0 - 01/2007

-----------------------
NEW: Klavarskribo staff notation (thanks to Troy Ramos for the suggestion!)
NEW: MIDI input instrument selection (early version by Luis Anton)
NEW: MIDI input with note matching and scoring (early version by Luis Anton)
NEW: Note hit/miss effects
NEW: If muted, temporarily unmute the selected MIDI device during gameplay
NEW: Level progress bar along top of game play screen
NEW: In-game open file dialog
NEW: Song finish screen with score, rating, and statistics

Version 0.4.0 - 10/2006

-----------------------
NEW: Initial Release