Using Pianolatron

Please consult the menu items in the navigation strip above for details on how to use specific aspects of the Pianolatron app, such as input from MIDI devices and game controllers. There are also interactive tours of the player interface that are available upon opening a piano roll in the “Play” or “Perform” view. To start the tour, select “Tour” in the site navigation menu while viewing those pages.

System Specifications and Compatibility

The Pianolatron web app will play on most notebook and desktop systems of fairly recent vintage, as well as some large-format tablets. Mobile phones will have limited functionality. All major operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS) are supported. Firefox and Chrome/Edge-family web browsers are recommended; the Safari browser for macOS and iOS may not provide an acceptable experience.

Troubleshooting Playback Difficulties

If you notice that the audio and video are not smooth and synchronized, find yourself waiting a long time for resources to load, or receive a playback latency warning from the app, the following steps may help to improve the situation:

• Close other browser tabs, or shut down the browser entirely and re-open it with only the Pianolatron open.
• Open the Pianolatron in a “private” or “incognito” window (usually done via the browser’s “File” menu).
• Quit other programs on the system that may be using considerable processing, memory or network resources, or reboot the system.
• In the Perform view, select the Audio Settings menu in the right-hand panel and reduce the Sample Count value, possibly to 4 or 2 (this reduces the memory requirements of the Pianolatron, at the cost of lower audio fidelity).

The “Loading resources…” animation may appear for a long time when the Pianolatron is first opened as the browser downloads the string sound samples necessary to emulate a piano. These samples then tend to be stored locally until the browser’s file cache is cleared, resulting in faster subsequent load times. The images for newly selected piano rolls must, however, always be loaded directly from the Stanford Digital Repository, so the Pianolatron requires a reliable network connection.

Accessibility

The Pianolatron web app is a multimodal work of research software which presents inherent obstacles to full accessibility for users with disabilities. We have done our best to mitigate these wherever possible, but certain limitations may remain. We invite affected users to contact us with specific concerns.

Contacting Us

Questions, bug reports and other feedback regarding the Pianolatron and the Piano Roll Archive may be sent to pianoroll_dataset@lists.stanford.edu.

Those who are technically inclined are welcome to file issues against the project’s GitHub repository.