News

November 27, 2017February 8, 2018

The virtual piano

A virtual piano in Karaboss

Karaboss can now teach you how to play the piano!
Even if you can not read the scores, learn to play the piano with falling notes.

How to do ?

First, select a piano piece in the explorer of Karaboss.
Two: click on the new “Piano” icon button on the left toolbar and that’s it.
When the song contains several tracks, they are displayed in different colors.
Typically: left / right hand for the piano.
You can remove unwanted tracks with the score editor

Keyboard shortcuts make your life easier:
You just have to type “space bar” to launch the player, “space bar” again to pause and when paused, “left key” to stop.

And if it’s going too fast or too slow, hit “+” or “-” keys to speed up or slow down the tempo.

Piano Training

See these videos on Youtube :

Ray Charles – Georgia On My Mind

The Handsome Family – Far From Any Road (Soundtrack True Detective)

Tips:

You can build your own files with the music score editor by removing tracks and keeping only the piano track and then split the remaining track into two tracks to have left and right hands.

You can even print your music scores in traditional notation using the score editor of Karaboss (export to PDF format an than print).

November 14, 2017February 5, 2018

2 . Download a synthesizer

Replace the basic Windows synthesizer with the excellent VirtualMIDISynth from CoolSoft

As you may have noticed, the sound reproduction of MIDI files is often disappointing.
This is due to the poor performance of the basic Windows synthesizer responsible to “interpret” your MIDI files.
Fortunately, you can significantly improve the sound quality by replacing it with another synthesizer, free, more powerful, and especially able to manage “banks of sounds” that contain samples of sounds of real instruments. (which is not the case of the synthesizer provided by Windows)

As explained in this article, in order to significantly improve the sound reproduction of MIDI files, you better replace the basic synthetizer provided by Windows, responsible for “(massacre) interpreting” your MIDI files, by another more powerful synthesizer, and especially capable of managing “sound banks” that contain sound samples of real instruments (which is not case of Windows one)
For more details, read this post.

The solution I use consists in replacing the basic Windows synthesizer with the VirtualMIDISynth synthesizer developped by CoolSoft.
But that’s not all, as explained above, you will have also to download a sound bank.
A sound bank is a file containing samples of sounds of real instruments.
A new synthetizer and a Sound Bank will change your mind about the sound quality of MIDI files.
Do not hesitate, the improvement is radical.

To go to the Coolsoft website and be sure to get the latest version of VirtualMIDISynth, click here.

Note :

VirtualMIDISynth installs as a new MIDI output device under Windows, so its use is totally transparent, and best of all, it can also be used from any application or video game that will improve its sound!

November 14, 2017June 12, 2024

A guided tour

An overview of the main Karaboss functions

When the application is launched, the Karaboss explorer is displayed. It positions itself on the last location used in the previous session.

You can launch a MIDI file directly by double-clicking on it, edit it, and add it to a playlist.
This home page also provides access to Karaboss’ main functions. Guided tour :

The “HOME” button :

allows you to re-center the explorer at the root of your song library.

The search engine :

search your song library, looking for any string in the name of your files.

The explorer (this page):

navigate through your library of music files and start playing a karaoke file by double clicking on it.

The playlists manager:

manage lists of songs and organize your parties in advance.

The “ARTISTS” button:

launches a search on web services on internet and allows to find all the recordings of an artist as well as the words (essentially in the Anglo-Saxon world)