Why buy a real piano when you can buy a USB-POWERED ROLL-UP PIANO for a fraction of the price ($45). This 49-key instrument records your playing, and does all kinds of sounds beyond "piano," including percussion and 128 non-percussion instruments. Best of all, you can roll it up and stuff it in your pocket after practice.
5:31 AM * PERMALINK * 6 comments
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Comments:
Not a terribly bad idea. In fact, I can see situations where this would be useful. If it's a MIDI device, it could make a decent small, portable keyboard.
Can I use this to type into my finale program, I wonder. It would be wonderful to just carry in the back pack with my laptop. I've been using an oxygen 8, but always have to keep using the octave switch. If this is efficient, it would be ideal. Perfect for composers, orchestrators and copyists.
Well, I wrote the above on October 15th. The keyboard arrived in a timely manner but did not even approach the poorest of expectations. Poorly made of a rubbery plastic, the software, even when updated from the equally buggy site, did not work. This is not even valuable as a toy. Works with no other music program. Caveat emptor.
I spoke with a rep named Fanny and she said my Laptop Mac won't recognize it. I hope they do build drivers for Mac. This is a great idea, if it is truly vel sens like they say. I will be watching and waiting to use it with Peformer and Finale. - Stokes
I know this is an old post but I ran across this site and they have 2 links to new drivers and a teaching app. Probably not much to it but maybe this will help someone out running Windows:
http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=0558
Plus as I Mac user and I have a need for a cheap but just ok roll up piano/keyboard so I'm tempted to get the Cheeky brand from geeks.com but I'm curious if it'll work in OS X anyways because of the integrated MIDI controller? Someone posted a question at this site which may end up with a solution for this one and many others for you guys too! :-)
http://www.fixya.com/support/t429883-mac_driver_dream_cheeky_usb_roll_up
Mac users can try this but I don't know if it works or not. Heck, it's worth a try! Did you use the built in Audio MIDI setup? It's been there since Jaguar 10.2.
From Apple's Help Forum:
To learn more about using Audio MIDI Setup, open Audio MIDI Setup, in Applications/Utilities, and choose Help > Audio MIDI Setup Help
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