iPhone Piano app is way out of tune

The Piano app is truly an anomaly. When you first open Piano on your iPhone, a black screen comes up for several seconds. Then nothing. Just when you’re about to give up and consider your app broken or your phone dead, up comes the keyboard. 

Piano’s keyboard is said to have 88 virtual piano keys, but this doesn’t matter, because they don’t really work. Of course, you won’t learn this until you waste a lot of time and scratch your head incessantly before you can figure out the functions. Why bother? 

The three options you are given are Record, Email, and Play. This seems easy enough, but the Piano app is counter-intuitive. What I eventually learned is that once you press Record, you don’t play the piano, you sing. Then, you email that to yourself in exchange for an email back consisting of several goodies: (supposedly) your song, a recording of your song in musical notes, and a music sheet documenting the notes you sang. 

Only one of three of the attachments worked for me at all. I could play back the voice recording (an .AIF file), but the music sheet (the .PS file) was the same every time no matter the song I recorded. It never varied. Same thing with the .WAV file. To top it all off, there was no manual or troubleshooting option, possibly because the creators are still trying to figure it out themselves?

Latest from NewsReports