Getting started

What you need

• A MIDI instrument — a keyboard for piano, a pad controller (built for the Yamaha FGDP-50) for drums, or a wind controller (built for the TravelSax) for saxo. Theory works without one.
• Midi Stroke — the desktop app on macOS, Windows or Linux, or the web app in a browser with Web MIDI.

Install the desktop app

This is the way to run it. MIDI is handled by the operating system (CoreMIDI, WinMM, ALSA), so no browser support question arises, hot-plugging a controller works, and everything runs offline.

brew install --cask vibetuned/tap/midi-stroke   # macOS
winget install Vibetuned.MidiStroke             # Windows

On Debian and Ubuntu there is a signed apt repository, and an AppImage for everything else — see the desktop app page for both, and for what each release ships.

Or use the browser

ms.vibetuned.com/app runs the same trainer in Chrome, Edge or Opera. Safari and Firefox don’t ship the Web MIDI API, so on those the desktop app is the only option.

Either way, plug your instrument in first (so it’s detected right away), then pick an instrument card.

On a phone

The browser app works on a phone too — Chrome on Android plays with a USB or Bluetooth MIDI instrument; Safari on an iPhone has no Web MIDI, so there the score and playback work, but not playing in. Hold the phone sideways: the piano, drums and saxophone show the score, or your instrument (the keyboard, the drum grid, the fingering), across the whole screen — switch with the toggle at the top left.

• The top notch, with the song’s name, opens the menu: back, the song navigator, statistics and playback.
• The bottom notch opens the play controls — mode, hands, the ⚙ settings — and its ▶ plays and pauses without opening them.
• In By ear, its panel stays on screen.

Installed from the browser (Add to Home screen), the app stays in landscape.

First session

1. Start — the first click boots the audio engine (one gesture is needed before any app may make sound).
2. Piano only: calibrate your keys — press the lowest and the highest key of your keyboard once. The virtual keyboard then only draws keys you actually have.
3. Pick a piece — collections on the left, pieces on the right. The badge on a piece shows your best precision so far.
4. Play. The score scrolls under a fixed cursor; the virtual instrument at the bottom (or the fingering chart, for saxo) glows the notes to play.

The two modes

Mode	What happens
Rhythm	Playback runs in time. Each note has a hit window; late, missed or wrong notes count against your precision.
Practice	Playback pauses at every note (or chord) and waits until you press exactly the right keys, then moves on. Wrong presses are counted but never block you.

Pressing play counts you in first: a bar, in large numbers over the score and a click on each beat (unless the sound is muted) — 4, 3, 2, Start in 4/4, 3, 2, Start in 3/4, 2, Start in 2/4. The score’s own rest is the “1”: the music comes in one beat after Start. A quick 6/8 is counted in two dotted quarters (2, Start), a slow one in six eighths (6, 5, 4, 3, 2, Start). Press play again while it counts to stop it, or switch the count-in off in the settings.

You can also start from your instrument: while a song waits at its start, a small Press any key to start shows where the count will appear, and any key (on the drums any pad, on the saxophone any note) starts it, count-in and all. A key pressed while the song is paused part-way through doesn’t restart it, so you can try a note freely — unless Start mid-song from the instrument is on in the settings, when it says Press any key to continue and does.

Transport & controls

• Tempo — in the ⚙ settings, a slider from 20 to 240 BPM (quarter notes per minute), with ↑ / ↓ for steps of 5 as you play; everything (score scroll, practice pauses, hit windows) scales musically with it. If the score states its own tempo it opens at it, and the slider shows the marking — score ♩ = 160 — with a way back to it once you have moved away. A score that changes tempo along the way is followed as it plays, and slowing it down keeps every section in proportion.
• Seek — drag the score itself, click/drag the minimap strip at the top (piano & saxo), or use the arrow keys. Dragging pauses the music; with Pause while scrolling off in the settings, it plays on from where you let go.
• Hand selection (piano) — L / R / both; the inactive staff dims and its notes stop being expected.
• Stats — precision, combos and history are kept per piece and per mode, on the device. The 📊 button in the header opens the history. The desktop app and your browser keep separate histories, since each stores its own.

At the end of a piece

When a piece plays to its end, its results open:

• The numbers — precision (the notes right the first time, out of the notes to play; a chord is one), accuracy (as the header shows it while you play), hits, wrong notes, missed notes, your longest combo, how early or late your keys were on average, and how long you played. Hover over one for what it counts.
• Progress — this session’s precision against your earlier sessions of the same piece and mode, with the change since last time, or a new best.
• Mistakes — the whole piece as a strip, each bar marked, with a red line for each wrong note and an orange one for each note missed.
• Timing (Rhythm) — the visual metronome’s wave for the whole piece, down on every beat and up between, with a dot for every key you played: white where it played a note, red where it played nothing, an orange ring where a note went unplayed. A dot in a trough is on the beat; on the slope before it, early; after it, late. Scroll it, or click the strip above to go to a part.
• ↺ Replay plays the piece again, count-in and all; Play next opens the next piece of the collection and starts it once it has loaded. After a Practice session, Rhythm switches to Rhythm and plays the piece again, timed.

A drum pattern loops on, so it has no end to show; By ear keeps its own results.

Settings

The ⚙ button at the end of the play controls opens what you set once rather than play with. Each setting is remembered on the device.

Setting	On	Off
Sound on	The metronome’s click and your instrument’s sound.	Silent.
Tempo	The slider, with the score’s own marking and a way back to it.	—
Count in before play (on)	A bar counted in before the music.	Play starts at once.
Start mid-song from the instrument (off)	A song paused part-way through starts again from any key, pad or note.	Only a song waiting at its start does.
Pause while scrolling (on)	Dragging the score or the minimap stops the music.	The music stops only while you drag, and plays on from where you let go.
Visual metronome (on)	The arrow on the cursor and its wave.	Hidden.

Hearing the score

The 🎧 button in the header, beside the 📊 stats, opens the playback panel with three choices. The button lights up whenever the score is being played:

• Playback off — the score stays silent and only your own playing sounds, which is how the trainer has always worked.
• Play in sound — the score plays as it scrolls, on the same instrument you are practising: the piano samples, the saxo reed tone, or the drum kit.
• MIDI → your device — instead of sounding locally, playback sends note-on and note-off to that output, so your own synth, module or DAW plays the part. Drums go out as General MIDI pads on channel 10.

The setting is remembered, and the exercise builders share it: each has a ▶ Listen button that plays the exercise you just built before you commit to practising it.

The visual metronome

On the cursor — the line that shows what to play now — a small arrow points back over the music and swings with the tempo: down to the bottom on every beat, up to the top between beats. As it goes, it draws its wave over the clef and the key signature, and every key you press leaves a dot on the wave, where the arrow was.

• A dot in a trough is a note on the beat.
• A dot on the slope before a trough came early; one on the slope after, late — the further up the slope, the further off.
• Notes between the beats sit higher up: an eighth halfway between two beats lands at the top.

The beat is the meter’s — a quarter in 4/4, a dotted quarter in 6/8 — counted from each bar line, and the arrow follows what you hear: it reaches the bottom as the metronome clicks. On the drums, which have no clef strip, the wave runs over the bar you have just played.

Visual metronome in the settings hides it, and brings it back; the app remembers which.

Scores open without instrument names at the start of the staves, so the clef strip stays clear for the wave.

MIDI status

The pill in the top-right shows whether MIDI is live and how many input devices are connected. All connected inputs are listened to at once — no device picking needed.

In the desktop app the connection is native, so a device plugged in mid-session appears on its own. In the browser the first session asks for the Web MIDI permission, and the pill stays red until it is granted.