piano-rs

A multiplayer piano using UDP sockets that can be played using computer keyboard, in the terminal.

Screenshots

Video clip

Compiling

You'll need to have Rust compiler and its package manager, Cargo installed to compile piano-rs. If you don't have them already, head over to https://rustup.rs/ to run the installer.

You can then compile piano-rs with:

$ git clone https://github.com/ritiek/piano-rs
$ cd piano-rs
$ cargo build --release

If you're using Ubuntu, you might face the following:

error: failed to run custom build command for `alsa-sys v0.1.1`

In this case, compiling again after installing libasound2-dev should solve the problem:

$ sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev

Usage

Once it compiles, run the binary with:

$ cargo run --release

You can also call the binary directly located in ./target/release/piano-rs.

Additional options to the compiled binary can be passed with cargo such as:

$ cargo run --release -- --help

Play piano in the terminal using PC (computer) keyboard.

USAGE:
    piano-rs [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
        --host-address <ADDRESS>        Set the host's IP Address and Port to connect to (Default: receiver address)
    -m, --mark-duration <DURATION>      Duration to show piano mark for, in ms (Default: 500)
    -n, --note-duration <DURATION>      Duration to play each note for, where 0 means till the end of note (Default: 0)
    -p, --play-file <FILEPATH>          Play notes from .yml file (Default: None)
    -t, --playback-tempo <AMOUNT>       Set playback speed when playing from file (Default: 1.0)
        --receiver-address <ADDRESS>    Set the IP Address and Port to which the receiver socket will bind to (Default:
                                        0.0.0.0:9999)
    -r, --record-file <FILEPATH>        Record notes to .yml file (Default: None)
        --sender-address <ADDRESS>      Set the IP Address and Port to which the sender socket will bind to. A port of 0
                                        implies to bind on a random unused port (Default: 0.0.0.0:0)
    -s, --sequence <AMOUNT>             Frequency sequence from 0 to 5 to begin with (Default: 2)
    -v, --volume <AMOUNT>               Set initial volume for notes (Default: 1.0)

• You can press the keys on your computer keyboard to play the piano notes.

• Increase or decrease the note frequency with ← and → respectively (or hold ctrl or shift while playing).

• Adjust the duration for how long the notes play for with ↑ and ↓.

• Adjust the volume of the notes with - and +.

• You can also record your piano session by passing the command-line argument -r <path/to/save/notes.yml> and play them later on with -p <path/to/save/notes.yml>.

Press the Esc key to exit the game.

NOTE: If you get no sound when you press keys, try running it in a directory containing the assets directory. The note sound files are loaded at runtime and piano-rs will fail to load them if it cannot find the assets directory in your current working directory.

Multiplayer

piano-rs is multiplayer! It can also be enjoyed with friends by sharing the same piano session. Here's how to setup:

On the 1st machine, you would launch piano-rs as usual with:

$ cargo run --release

or

$ ./target/release/piano-rs

On the 2nd machine, you would then pass the IP address of the receiver socket of the 1st machine, which by default binds to 0.0.0.0:9999 and can be overriden with --receiver-address. That means, you would run something like this on the 2nd machine to connect to the 1st machine's piano-rs session:

$ cargo run --release -- --host-address=192.168.1.3:9999

or

$ ./target/release/piano-rs --host-address=192.168.1.3:9999

Here, 192.168.1.3 is the IP address of the 1st machine.

The 2nd machine should now be connected and will share the same piano-rs session as the host machine. Any keys you hit, should be marked with a different color indicator.

Similar to the way you connected the 2nd machine, you can connect any number of machines to share the same piano-rs session!

---

NOTE: These multiplayer features do not make use of tokio-rs runtime and instead use std::net::UdpSocket for communication, which comes included with the Rust standard library. The major limitation of relying on std::net::UdpSocket is that the network requests are handled sequentially on the basis of first come, first serve. This would be a problem if hundreds of players are connected to the same piano-rs session and are hitting the keys at the same time. Obviously, we could acheive much better performance if we were to handle network requests asynchronously with tokio-rs and futures. Unfortunately, these awesome libraries have a bit of learning curve which I don't have the time to go through at the moment! It will be awesome if someone would like to help here make a transition to asynchronously handle network requests.

The cool devs at tokio-rs have also been trying to lower the learning curve by introducing async and await keywords, similar to Python. However, these keywords at the moment are only available under the recent alpha release of tokio-rs for Rust nightly. See the relevant blog post.

Running tests

$ cargo test

Resources

• piano-rs uses the same note sounds and key bindings as multiplayerpiano. In fact, the note sound files you see in the assets sub-directory are downloaded from multiplayerpiano itself. If you're a moderator on their website and got a problem with this, let me know and I'll remove and stop using the sound files in this repository.

• You can use this paste to learn to play some popular songs. If you're interested, I've transcribed a few synthesia YouTube videos in this gist, so they can be played with piano-rs.

License

The MIT License