Pianoman v3.6.1

Piano chord progression editor with a dark-mode GUI.

Compose, play, analyse and save chord progressions using a clickable piano keyboard. Supports PC audio (sine wave) and MIDI output. Multilingual: English, Dutch, French, German.

Features

• Clickable piano keyboard (1–5 octaves)
• Recognises and names chords automatically (Major, Minor, 7th, 9th, Sus, dim, aug, …)
• Chord progression editor: add, copy, reorder, remove chords (drag & drop)
• Key detection with Roman numeral analysis (I – IV – V – I) — multilingual
• Scale highlighter — marks notes of the detected key on the keyboard
• Chord inversions — Root position, Inv 1, Inv 2, Inv 3 buttons
• Best Voicing — picks the inversion with the least voice movement vs. the previous chord
• Chord suggestions based on current key and last chord
• Play back progressions (PC audio or MIDI)
• Save/load progressions as JSON
• Export to PDF (and import chord names from PDF)
• MIDI import and export
• 5 themes: Dark Gold, Midnight Blue, Forest, Classic, Crimson
• Window position and settings stored in settings.ini

New in v3.6.1

Area	Change
Performance	_darken() and _font() results cached at module level
Performance	scale_notes.index() replaced with O(1) dict lookups
Performance	self._all_keys cached in draw_piano(); no more inline list concatenation
Performance	canvas.coords() pre-fetched before draw loop in draw_saved_canvas()
Performance	Change-detection in _apply_keyboard_visual() and _refresh_scale_highlight()
Performance	Widget .get() calls batched in play_chord() and _play_song_thread()
Platform	sounddevice import restricted to Windows; simpleaudio used on other platforms

New in v3.6

Feature	Description
Multilingual analysis bar	Key name and mode now translated (EN/NL/FR/DE)
Scale highlighter	Toggle button marks in-scale keys blue, dims out-of-scale keys
Chord inversions	Root / Inv 1 / Inv 2 / Inv 3 buttons below the piano
Best Voicing	Finds the inversion closest to the previous chord (voice leading)
UI refactor	Piano zone with header/footer; two-column action area; status bar

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• sounddevice — Windows (or simpleaudio on other platforms)
• mido + python-rtmidi
• numpy
• reportlab

pip install sounddevice mido python-rtmidi numpy reportlab

Running from source

python Pianoman.py

Windows executable

A pre-built Windows executable is available on the Releases page. No Python installation required.

Version history

Version	Date	Notes
3.6.1	2026-06-11	Performance optimisations; sounddevice Windows-only
3.6	2026-06-06	Scale highlighter, chord inversions, best voicing, multilingual analysis, UI refactor
3.5	2026-04-05	Add Chord; octave pulldown; volume slider per output; window state saved; PDF import; drag & drop
Earlier	—	See source file header

Author

Frank van Dijke