Disklavier

Jeff,

I think I am the only "people" talking about the bugs in Voyetra's 
"Teach Me Piano" software. The bugs in this software do not crash your 
computer.  I actually made a list of all of the bugs that I had 
identified in the program about 1.5 years ago and sent it to Voyetra, 
but they chose to ignore it and introduced a "Deluxe" edition of "Teach 
me Piano" which only added some games and a few other features mostly 
targeted at children while leaving all of the lessons in the original 
version unchanged in the Deluxe edition.  Unfortunately, this meant that 
the bugs are still present.

"Teach Me Piano" is capable of working with any midi instrument, 
including the disklavier, to "grade" a students performance.  You are 
graded on both your rhythm accuracy and on your pitch accuracy.  In 
other words you are graded on  whether you played the correct notes and 
played them with the correct timing as specified by the time signature 
of the piece.  This feature will consistently report very low scores (on 
the order of 30-40%) when you are playing both hands and the music has 
any degree of complexity.  It simply does not matter how well you play 
the piece, it will not be reflected in your "score".  However, if you 
play one hand alone and the music is not too complex, the scoring 
provides a reasonable indication of your performance quality.  This may 
not be a bug so much as a limitation of the midi information that can be 
returned by the disklavier and the ability of your lap top computer to 
correctly process that information in real time.  I have found similar 
scoring problems with Adventus' Piano Suite Premiere software.

Other bugs within "Teach Me Piano" that I recall are one of the musical 
selections being left out of the Song Book, occasional notation errors 
where the note shown in the musical selection is not the correct note, 
 the fact that in Performance Mode (where you are playing along to an 
instrumental accompaniment) the page turn anticipation feature does not 
work, and other similar errors.  Interestingly enough, when you are 
being graded on pitch, if you play the correct note it is scored 
correctly whereas if you play the note in the music appearing on screen, 
you will receive an error.  You would think it would have been an easy 
thing to have corrected these errors in the notation.  

If you are interested in a detailed listing of the errors in "Teach Me 
Piano", I'll be happy to send you a copy of the letter (as a Word 
document) that I sent to Voyetra about 1.5 years ago.  

Tom



yamahamale wrote:

>I'm wondering what are these bugs that are in Voyetra "Teach Me Piano" 
>that people are talking about. Is it something that will crash the 
>computer over and over? Is it in every lesson or most? Thanks, Jeff
>
>--- In disklavier@y..., Tom Wheeler <tnwheeler@n...> wrote:
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>>There are  piano instruction software packages available other than 
>>Voyetra's "Teach me Piano" which you may also wish to explore.
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>>Of all of the piano instruction packages that I have considered, I 
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>like 
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>>the Voyetra "Teach Me Piano" package best because: I have spoken 
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>personally about a year ago with Mr. 
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>>Hugh Berberich who designed the "Teach me Piano"  musical course, 
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>and he 
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>>and I both have tried hard to get Voyetra to expand this package and 
>>also to correct some bugs that are in the program.  Unfortunately, 
>>Voyetra seems to have little interest in correcting the software 
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>bugs. 
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>> Nonetheless, this is still a very worthwhile introduction to the 
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>piano 
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>>for serious students.  
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>>Tom
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