Synthesia - Piano for Everyone

Visit http://www.synthesiagame.com/ for more information.

The Synthesia Learning Pack is included in the game and doesn't require a
separate download. To try it out, load any of the following demo songs
to temporarily unlock all features:

- Chorale Setting in F Major, J. S. Bach

- Menuet (Trio), by G.F. Handel

And the following two credited below from GameMusicThemes.com:

- Dragon Warrior - Town Theme
- Sonic the Hedgehog - Green Hill Zone

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Synthesia has primarily been created by Nicholas Piegdon.

The following people have contributed directly with code:

- Dave Ray: STRING/WSTRING macro
- NeHe Productions: OpenGL base code
- Christian Auby: input octave shifting code
- Luis Anton: early version of the MIDI input code

Others have contributed ideas:

- Daniel Lawrence: the name Synthesia
- Many others in email and in the Synthesia Talk forums

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Synthesia's video game music samples are provided by Game Music Themes.
Visit http://www.gamemusicthemes.com/ for high quality piano MIDI and sheets.

Bubble Bobble - Main Theme

Composed by Zuntata / Arranged by Gori Fater

Dragon Warrior - Town Theme

Composed by Koichi Sugiyama / Arranged by Russell Copeland

Sonic the Hedgehog - Green Hill Zone

Composed by Masato Nakamura / Arranged by Gori Fater

Super Mario Bros. - Overworld Theme

Composed by Koji Kondo / Arranged by BLUESCD

Super Mario Bros. - Underwater Theme

Composed by Koji Kondo / Arranged by BLUESCD

Tetris - Theme A
Arranged by Gori Fater

The Sims - Buying Theme 1

Arranged by Gori Fater

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Overworld

Composed by Koji Kondo / Arranged by w3sp

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Lost Woods

 Composed by Koji Kondo / Arranged by BLUESCD

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Zelda's Lullaby

Composed by Koji Kondo / Arranged by BLUESCD

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The music in the "G Major Music" folder comes from Gilbert DeBenedetti's
G Major Music Theory website. Find more at www.gmajormusictheory.org

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Change Log
"(LP)" denotes features available in the Learning Pack

Version 0.6.5 - 09/2008

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NEW: (LP) Note Labels option on the Play Settings screen.
NEW: (LP) Resize sheet music display with F3 or by dragging border with mouse.
NEW: (LP) Name of the current song key displayed down in status area.
NEW: 120+ new songs from gmajormusictheory.org included in the release.
NEW: Added a marker to the "middle C" keyboard key.
NEW: Mouse auto-fade after a few seconds of no movement.
NEW: Pause/Resume button in the bottom right corner of the gameplay screen.
NEW: Enhanced the keyboard display with a red strip of felt.
CHG: Changed the appearance of various windows and buttons a little.
CHG: Pushed MIDI output to a separate thread, which should improve performance.
CHG: Game startup should be a little faster when loading large songs.
CHG: Toggle "Full Debug Output" with F7. If you're running into a repeatable
problem, it may be useful to run the game with full debug output on before
sending me the log from the run containing the problem.
FIX: Practice mode "next note" markers no longer appear at staggered times
when more than one note exists at the same time.
FIX: Practice mode "next note" markers are now always removed properly when
rewinding at low speeds.
FIX: Controller, after-touch, and pitch bend events are no longer sent to
the output device for "You Play" tracks.
FIX: Notes can no longer be skipped in practice mode at high speeds.
FIX: The "next note" marker is now shown for all notes that can be hit while
waiting for user input, not just notes directly on the line.
FIX: Track selection boxes can not longer run off the bottom of the screen.
FIX: Sheet music button on track selection screen is much easier to see now.
FIX: Practice mode can no longer be selected when no tracks have been set
to "You Play" mode. A helpful message is indicated instead.

Version 0.6.4 - 06/2008

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NEW: (LP) Sheet music display with scrolling and page-flip progression modes.
NEW: (LP) Practice mode that waits for you to hit the right notes.
NEW: (LP) Measure lines in falling note display. (Toggle with F4.)
NEW: (LP) Learning Pack key entry screen (off the main menu) with four "demo"
songs that temporarily unlock all the new features.
NEW: Added "Play Settings" screen to handle the growing set of song options.
NEW: Added option to lock keyboard height to conserve screen space for notes.
CHG: Game continues to play in the background if alt-tabbed or minimized.
CHG: Added the old "Notes played" statistic to the playing screen (from 0.4.0).
CHG: Made "Play all user input" the default behavior.
CHG: Changed the vertical-guide layout for falling notes.
CHG: Added option to disable auto-"System MIDI volume" adjust in Windows.
FIX: Bounded max size of praise/combo text.
FIX: Removed un-openable MIDI input/output devices from device lists. (However,
this requires a quick "open" test on each device at startup. Some devices
can take a very long time (>30s) to open. So, the open test can be turned
off via the "HKCU\Software\Synthesia\Skip Device Open Test" string key set
to a value of "1".
FIX: Don't crash while FF'ing an event heavy song with certain output devices.
FIX: Caps-lock no longer affects octave shifting keys.
FIX: Windows installer now includes DirectX redistributable, so no more missing
DLL errors. Stand-alone zip users should run directx_redist/DXSETUP.exe.

Version 0.6.3 - 01/2008

-----------------------
NEW: Keyboard zoom options (on the Track Selection screen).
NEW: Options screen:
- Play all user input / Play only correct user input.
- Default track mode: Played Automatically / Played But Hidden.
- Play notes using velocity from the: song / user input.
- Toggle sparks for performance.
- Toggle ignore SysEx messages.
- Toggle bank select fix.
- Toggle renderer backend in Windows.
NEW: DirectX rendering backend.
NEW: Better looking white keys.
NEW: Highest score for current settings shown on track selection screen.
NEW: Software mouse cursor.
NEW: Copy error text to clipboard before exiting.
NEW: Added an easter egg somewhere. Try and find it!
NEW: Added log. Found in "Application Data\Synthesia\log.txt"
CHG: Note scoring is now additionally based on timing accuracy.
CHG: Split all remaining "Various" tracks into single-instrument tracks.
FIX: Sometimes first note of "You Play" track would use wrong instrument.
FIX: Caps-lock no longer affects the software keyboard.
FIX: Windows crash from attempting to send output to a MIDI device too fast.
FIX: Made MIDI output reset stronger in Windows, to avoid locked-"on" notes.
FIX: Events using running status after a meta event weren't loaded correctly.

Version 0.6.2a - 09/2007

------------------------
NEW: Files with .kar extensions are now supported.
NEW: "You Play, Muted" track mode.
CHG: Renamed "stray notes" to "extra notes" and made them break the combo.
FIX: Only reset the MIDI output device after playing something through it.
(In some cases, a reset takes upwards of one second. This reduces
how often that time hit occurs.)
FIX: Program change and channel pressure events are now sent correctly when
using an external output device on the Mac.

Version 0.6.2 - 08/2007

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NEW: High score list per-song, per-track-configuration.
NEW: Tracks that use more than one MIDI channel are now split into one-track-
 per-channel. This makes almost every format-0 and even some format-1
songs MUCH more playable.
NEW: Fast-forward and Rewind. Press the left/right arrows to jog the song.
NEW: Software Keyboard. Tries to guess the best starting octave to shift to
based on the average location of all notes in "You Play" tracks.
NEW: Sparkle effect while holding down keys correctly
NEW: Track settings are remembered across game sessions
NEW: "Visible Only" track mode.
NEW: Mac version fades between the game and the desktop on start and quit.
NEW: Fade transition between screens.
NEW: You can override the window size with registry/plist string settings
named "Window Width" and "Window Height". Use whatever number you want
in either string setting.
CHG: Gameplay starts out paused so you can get your bearings on input.
CHG: The software license Synthesia is released under has changed. It is no
longer the open-source MIT license, but rather a proprietary closed-
source license. No worries, the game is still free.
CHG: New keyboard mapping: view stretch is PgUp/PgDn, Speed is Up/Down.
CHG: Track selection screen is now sorted left-to-right by average note pitch.
CHG: Remember view stretch between multiple tries of the same song.
CHG: Remember octave offset between multiple tries of the same song.
CHG: Possible track modes are based on whether input and output devices have
been selected. e.g. "You Play" won't be available when input is disabled.
CHG: The falling note display runs much smoother (especially at low speeds).
FIX: SysEx MIDI messages in songs are now sent to output devices.
FIX: File Open dialog no longer pops under the game window in Windows Vista.
FIX: Bank Select events sometimes cause tracks not to play in Vista and Mac.
Now on those platforms, bank select messages have been disabled. If this
causes problems, set a "Disallow Bank Select Fix" string in the registry
or plist to anything other than "0" to stop the special behavior.
FIX: Pausing the game while holding keys down caused sound (in "You Play"
tracks) and key images to "stick" after resuming gameplay.
FIX: Removed (poorly written, first-attempt at) multi-monitor OpenGL code to
fix a crash for many users.

Version 0.6.1 - 05/2007

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NEW: On the Mac, output to external devices is now available.
NEW: On the Mac, you can now drag a MIDI file to the application on the Dock or
in Finder or right click a MIDI file and choosing "Open With..." to open.
NEW: In Windows, added a low-tech solution to choose between different monitors
connected to the SAME video card (doesn't work in multi-video-card
situations.) (Set the string key HKCU\Software\Synthesia\Monitor to "0"
for primary monitory, "1" for secondary, etc.)
CHG: Mac OpenGL display now has v-sync enabled.
CHG: Mac game window is now much less obtrusive. Other windows are allowed to
be on top and the Dock and Application bar can both be made visible by
hovering the mouse over there positions for a second or so. The game
window also no longer must be hidden during file selection or error boxes.
FIX: In Windows, MIDI SysEx messages in input are no longer flagged as errors.
FIX: On the Mac, fixed MIDI that used RPN / NRPN controller events (e.g. to
set pitch bend) so they're now handled correctly.
FIX: On the Mac, output devices are now reset much harder than before, so
output device internal state that may be set by one song isn't carried
over to another.
FIX: On the Mac, there was a potential problem with some input devices that
might send bursts of events all at once. Previously, only the first
 event in the incoming list of events was recognized. Now, any number of
incoming events will be recognized correctly.
FIX: Picked a font for the Mac version to use that is actually a default
system font. (Apparently "Palatino" only ships with iLife now.)
FIX: On the Mac, fixed a problem where the (modal!) file open dialog could
be hidden underneath the game window, leaving you not choice but to force-
quit the program.
FIX: Disabled OpenGL depth testing to fix a problem where text would sometimes
not appear above other controls (TrackBox, SongBox, etc.) in Windows.
FIX: Score state now displays correctly at low resolutions (like 800x600).
FIX: Title bar no longer pops when changing speed at the beginning of gameplay.
FIX: Text centering and placement on the Mac is now properly implemented.
FIX: MIDI files with non-all-lowercase file extensions can now be selected
in the File Open dialog box.

Version 0.6.0 - 04/2007

-----------------------
NEW: Mac Version!
NEW: All new note and keyboard graphics!
NEW: All new menu graphics.
NEW: Right-click association option in installer.
CHG: Renamed and rebranded the project to "Synthesia"
CHG: Switched from base 2D OS drawing to 3D accelerated OpenGL drawing.
CHG: Moved status display to the bottom of the screen during play.
CHG: Made default music folder less imposing. Now the game will only default
to the directory the very first run. Afterwards, it will remember the
last file you attempted to play (like it used to).
CHG: Improved exception handling.
FIX: Don't crash if "Synthesia Music" folder doesn't exist.
FIX: No more crash sometimes when app regains focus on the title screen.

Version 0.5.1 - 02/2007

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NEW: Your notes are played (in the correct instrument for the track)
NEW: Tooltips on all menu controls and settings.
NEW: 10 Sample songs from Game Music Themes.
NEW: "Stray Notes" metric on stats screen
NEW: "Average Speed" metric on stats screen
NEW: Box around MIDI input test on title screen
NEW: Combo counter and much improved stats display during play.
CHG: Improved Klavarskribo staff notation.
CHG: Match input to closest unplayed note's opportunity window center instead
of matching against the first available unplayed note.
CHG: Swapped blue and yellow in the track color order, making blue the new
"first" color.
CHG: ReasonableSynthVolume object replaces MidiCommOut::SetReasonableSynthVol
and now works for all mixers in the system instead of only the first.
CHG: Darkened the border for a few different colors to increase the contrast
between sharp/flat notes in a series.
CHG: Default to new "Piano Hero Music" folder at startup. (User configurable
in the future.)
FIX: Disabled MIDI input while game is paused to prevent cheating.
FIX: Made MidiCommOut::Reset() actually reset everything by fully closing and
reopening the device. midiOutReset() apparently only turns off the keys
and pedals on each track. It *doesn't* reset patches or volume.
FIX: Reworked MIDI engine to correct a sync/lag issue in songs that started
 with a considerable delay before the first note.
FIX: Notes don't draw on top of keys anymore.
FIX: MIDI track default color order is now consistent for all files.
FIX: Two tracks with identical notes would cause the "second" track's note to
not appear. This normally would not matter, as they overlap completely,
but when hiding the first track, the second note would not show.

Version 0.5.0 - 01/2007

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NEW: Klavarskribo staff notation (thanks to Troy Ramos for the suggestion!)
NEW: MIDI input instrument selection (early version by Luis Anton)
NEW: MIDI input with note matching and scoring (early version by Luis Anton)
NEW: Note hit/miss effects
NEW: If muted, temporarily unmute the selected MIDI device during gameplay
NEW: Level progress bar along top of game play screen
NEW: In-game open file dialog
NEW: Song finish screen with score, rating, and statistics

Version 0.4.0 - 10/2006

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NEW: Initial Release