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F.A.Q.

Why don't I hear any sound?
Make sure your iPhone is not in silent mode. Also make sure your iPhone or iPod Touch volume isn't turned all the way down. The original iPod Touch doesn't have volume controls on the hardware, but the volume set in your Music (iPod) application will affect Pianofly and other audio software. Pianofly also has a volume control in the top left corner of the screen; make sure it is turned up. Finally, if you are listening to Pianofly on your iPhone or iPod speaker, you may not be able to hear very low notes; the hardware cannot reproduce low bass frequencies. Try scrolling up the keyboard and see if you can hear higher notes.

Why do I sometimes hear a crackling sound?
When you play three or four keys at once, the combined volume is three or four times greater than just playing one note. If the total combined volume is too high, you may hear some "clipping". Pianofly has a built in "Auto-gain" feature so that when this happens Pianofly will turn down the master volume just enough for the clipping to go away. To completely avoid clipping you must keep the master volume at a lower setting. We give you the option to turn the volume all the way up to 10 (which you may want when only playing one or two notes), but you risk some clipping when playing multiple notes together. How many notes it takes to cause clipping at a particular volume depends on the instrument sound (number of nodes and the shape of their envelopes).

Why are the instrument icons missing when I re-launch Pianofly?
This is a small bug that appeared just before launch. It has been fixed in the 1.1 upgrade. Please download the upgrade from the App Store.

Why don't you offer triangle waves, sampled waves, LFOs, etc.?
There are hundreds of features that could be included in any piece of music software. Designing Pianofly required countless choices. To include every possible feature would make Pianofly very hard to use, and it would mean spending forever in development. We settled on a feature set that we felt made a strong product that we could get into users hands sooner rather than later. We will continue to add more features to Pianofly and would be happy to hear your requests and suggestions.

How do I record what I play?
We are anticipating a simple recording or sequencing capability in a future upgrade of Pianofly. We decided to release version 1.0 now, without recording, at a lower price than we originally expected. We hope to add recording in a couple months and will likely raise the price at that time. Upgrades for current users will be free.

I've changed a sound; how do I revert to the previous version?
A revert feature was added in the 1.1 upgrade. Please download the new version from the App Store, if you don't already have it. After making changes to a sound, choose "Revert Sound" from the sound menu (tap the button just below the help button in the upper right corner of the screen) to revert the sound to the way it was when you launched Pianofly. When you quit, all of the sounds are saved and can no longer be reverted to earlier versions. You can also use copy/paste to save a copy of a sound. To restore all sounds and icons to their "factory settings" (any sounds you've created will be lost) you should delete Pianofly from your iPhone/iPod and reinstall it from iTunes or from the App Store.

How do I get good icons for my sounds?
We used a variety of methods to create our icons. You can find some good artwork using Mobile Safari, hold your finger on the image and a menu will pop up letting you save the image. It will be saved in your Photo Library and you can choose it for an icon in Pianofly. We will post some icons on our website following the themes shipped with Pianofly. We also used the drawing program No.2 from our Lint Labs brand to draw some of the icons.

How can I see the precise frequency or amplitude values for sounds?
We are looking to include precise frequency, amplitude and duration readings in a future version of Pianofly. At this time it was felt it would clutter the screen and impact performance. This will likely be offered as a setting that can be turned on or off, so 'pro' users can have it if they want it.

Can I change the phase of a wave form?
Not in this version. This is one of those features that would let you do a few cool things, but more often it would cause unnecessary confusion. Changing the phase of a node would be more likely to cause a click (from a sudden amplitude change) or cancel out a desired wave than to do anything very interesting. We may allow phase changes as an option in the future.

Why does the keyboard sometimes jump to the right or left?
If two fingers get very close together, the iPhone/iPod will sometimes merge them together, mistaking the two touches for a single wide touch. If Pianofly was watching one of those two touches for scrolling the piano, the sudden merging of the two touches can cause the keyboard to suddenly scroll a short distance. Because the touch recognition happens in Apple's software before Pianofly can access the data, there isn't a lot we can do to fix this yet. We are looking at ways to smooth out these sudden changes, and have asked Apple for access to the raw touch data so we can track the touches directly.

I want to see more from miniMusic, how can I help?
In addition to buying our current products (which funds development) any way that you can spread the word helps us spend more time and money on developing upgrades and new products. Also, please rate or review our products in the iTunes App Store, and on other websites (like iusethis, apptism, appbeacon, whatsoniphone, appvee, etc.) or forums or leave comments on existing reviews or articles.

Why isn't there a free demo of Pianofly that I can try out?
Apple has several restrictions on what type of demo or "lite" versions developers can create for an application. At this time a demo would either have too many features and many users wouldn't ever need to upgrade to the full version, or the demo would be too restricted and would be a bad experience for most users.

How can you sell Pianofly for just $2.99?
This is a temporary price; we intend to raise the price as we add features (especially recording or sequencing capabilities), and we will release future products at higher prices. Also, part of this current price is to make a big introductory splash for our miniMusic brand on the iPhone. In the future we expect our applications to range from $5 to $20.