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Comment by Rochus | Hacker News Reader

That's funny, but there is no information whatsoever who did it by which means and for what purpuse. The pieces sound nice, but there seems to be an issue with the relative loudness of the voices.

Any hints?

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Yes good point I probably should add info. I made it as a hobby project. It was created with notagen

The music is rendered to mp3, isn't it? Do you render it in realtime or is the composition/rendering process ahead of the current performance? Have you noticed that sometimes one or more voices are barely audible? I assume the midi dynamics has a too wide range.

Thank you for your interest and feedback. Yes it is rendered to mp3. Notagen creates an ABC file, which I then convert to MIDI and then to mp3. I also convert the ABC file to svg for displaying the sheet music on the web page. I simply have a cron job to create more music every hour. Yes I have noticed that some voices are barely audible, I think because notagen creates a wide range, I can look into this more. This is really just a proof of concept, but if you have ideas on how to make it more interesting or useful, let me know. My email address is in my profile. Thank you

I have thought it may be interesting to display the notes on the sheet music only as the audio is played, so I may try to work on this next.

It's a great idea actually. From my humble point of view (as a trained musician and former producer), the following features would be great:

- since it's called "endless" and has an URL like a web radio, it would be nice if it would just continue to play (automatically, or once the play button is pressed) and not stop at the end of the piece.

- a professional piano sound would be great; something like Pianoteq (https://www.modartt.com/pianoteq_overview, stage edition is sufficient) which has a great sound including good room and instrument characteristics simulation, and which requires little resources compared to other plugins; you could even make a deal with Modartt and cooperate with them for your piano.fm.

> I have noticed that some voices are barely audible

Maybe use a fixed lower velocity threshold, or just use the logarithm of the calculated velocity values.

> it may be interesting to display the notes on the sheet music only as the audio is played

That would certainly be impressive and useful for some people; I personally would prefer some feature to download a piece as mp3, or midi, or ABC.

Thank you for the helpful feedback. I've added download buttons for mp3, midi and abc. I've also made it autoplay and more seamlessly play the next song after one ends. Now I will work on correcting the voices and making it sound more like a professional piano.

Thanks for your effort. The three download buttons work. According to the button state, the music should play when I come to the site, but it doesn't. If I press the button twice, it sounds. Then if I just let the piece run, when switching to the next song, only the title changes, but I still hear the former piece.

Thanks, I'm working on it, so keep checking back for changes. The music should sound better, but I am refining it as I go with the goal of sounding like natural piano.

I will also work out the kinks with autoplay not working in some browsers (it should work with Chrome)

Great. The piano sounds better now (though for a "natural" piano a lot of other aspects like damper noises, resonant strings, etc. have to be considered). You could try to generally turn down the velocity a bit (especially relative to the "chant voice"), and you could even add a random velocity factor to each chord or note so that it sounds a bit more human-like. Switching to the next audio now works for me.

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