Piano learning apps for Windows

The idea was simple: find a MIDI file, load it, dissect every note, see the chords, slow it down, and learn the song by looking at it on the keyboard, in your own tempo.

Back in the early 2000s, I used an iMac and called my Korg TR connected to it a home recording studio. Lol, right? The first time I saw MIDI notes and chords fall onto a keyboard in Logic Pro, I was blown away. The problem was that the piano roll was horizontal, and loading an entire DAW just to learn songs was complete overkill. Surely there had to be a tiny, dedicated app for that.

There was. By sheer luck, I found Rondo, a little Mac app that did exactly what I wanted. I bought a license immediately and spent months emailing the author with feature requests and bug reports. Eventually, life got in the way, development stopped, and newer versions of macOS killed it. When I switched to Windows, I thought finding a replacement would be a piece of cake. The Windows app ecosystem must be 100 times bigger, right? Boy, was I wrong.

I spent years searching and probably tested 15 different apps. Every single one missed something important: crucial features, decent UX, reasonable pricing, or the ability to work with my own music without subscriptions and other nonsense. Right before the COVID lockdown, I finally bought a Synthesia license. I wasn’t impressed with the demo, but the Pro version promised to load and play any MIDI file. And boy, was I disappointed. Maybe it’s the gamification angle, I don’t know, and I don’t care, but compared to Rondo, it sucked donkey balls. And still does.

So, did I really want to use six different shitty apps in parallel to do one thing? Hell, no! I realized I was chasing a unicorn, and if I wanted the app I imagined, I’d have to build one from scratch. After almost two years of development in my spare time, it turned out to be too useful and stable to keep it for myself, so I decided to make it free and open source. That’s Orfeo, a spiritual successor to Rondo (RIP). It rests on one belief: with the right tool, every MIDI file can be a piano lesson. Your existing music collection becomes your syllabus, instead of being locked into somebody else’s curated song catalog.

My musical context: All I wanted was to learn difficult passages from songs like I Know a Little by Lynyrd Skynyrd, My Baby Just Cares for Me by Nina Simone, and The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby. And a decent Windows desktop MIDI player with a virtual keyboard.

And here’s the thing: real MIDI files are messy. Orfeo lets you split combined piano tracks into left and right hands, fix wrong notes, hide unwanted parts, transpose, slow playback, and loop difficult passages. You can save changes as a new version without ever overwriting the original. A file that’s 80% good becomes 100% usable instead of being discarded.

It isn’t perfect. There’s no live per-note grading, timing-accuracy scoring, or structured beginner curriculum yet. I’m working on notation display and a practice mode where playback waits for you to press the keys on your MIDI keyboard. What Orfeo offers in return is a free, open-source tool that never tries to retain you as a subscriber. It’s only a tool, an aid, mind you. We all know the only real way to learn music is to study theory and learn to read notes. But we’re way past that.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What would your ideal visual piano-learning tool have? What am I missing?

Aleš, ORFEO developer

P.S. I’m looking for contributors, particularly developers interested in macOS or Linux ports.