Synthesia.strobe
Light up more than just 4 keys
The Casio LK-S250 can only light four keys at once, which makes two-handed practice in Synthesia impossible. This cycles the lights through the notes fast enough that the whole chord reads as lit.
James Hansenv1.0.0free and open sourceWindowsfor Synthesia 10.9 and the Casio LK-S250
downloads. v1.0.0
v1.0.0 on GitHub, with checksums and older versions →what it adds.
- Cycles the lightsWhen more than four keys need lighting, it rotates through them in groups instead of dropping the rest.
- Fast enough to readA new group every 50 ms, about 6.7 flashes a second, so a full chord looks lit rather than blinking.
- Two-handed practiceThe reason it exists. Both hands finally get lit keys at the same time.
- Nothing to configureNo settings window, no registry keys, no files changed. It sits in the MIDI path and gets on with it.
why it exists.
The LK-S250 lights four keys at a time. Synthesia sends it everything, the keyboard lights the first four and ignores the rest, and the moment you play with both hands the lighting stops being useful.
Cycling the lights had been asked for and had not made it up the Synthesia priority list, which is fair enough, it is a fix for one keyboard. So this sits between Synthesia and the keyboard and rotates the groups itself. Synthesia is not modified.
the community.
There is a Synthesia.strobe channel on the musica.studio Discord. Bug reports, feature requests, questions, and screenshots of what you made with it all go there, and it is the fastest way to reach me about this project.
good to know.
It works by injecting a DLL into Synthesia and intercepting its MIDI output, and installing it asks for administrator rights. That is a lot of trust for a lighting fix, so the source is there to read first.
Free and open source under the GPLv3. Synthesia itself is left exactly as it was.