Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard (or VMPK for short) is an open source, freely distributed and multi-platform graphical software project designed from the ground up to act as a standalone MIDI controller tool. The software runs on all mainstream operating systems and can be used to drive a MIDI synthesizer, despite that fact that it cannot be used to produce sounds.
Features at a glance
Key features include support for driving software or hardware MIDI synthesizers, support for driving internal or external MIDI synthesizers, support for mouse and keyboard peripheral devices, which can be used to play MIDI notes, support for viewing played MIDI notes from another MIDI file player or instrument, support for receiving MIDI events, support for generating MIDI events, as well as a modern graphical user interface written in Qt.
in addition to the above, the software features alphanumeric keyboard mapping, which can be easily configured using the GUI (XML files are used for storing the settings), support for French, Spanish and German keyboard layouts, as well as the ability to send controllers and program changes to a MIDI synthesizer. All the MIDI input/output features are powered by the cross-platform Drumstick RT framework.
Provides definitions for different devices and standards
Please note that Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard can provide definitions for different devices and standards as .INS files, which can be written by popular applications, such as QTractor and TSE3.
Under the hood, availability and supported OSes
The application is written in the C++ programming language, using the Qt GUI toolkit for its beautiful graphical user interface. Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard is a cross-platform software, supported on the GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. On GNU/Linux, it’s available for download as universal installers in the .run file format, as well as a source tarball.
