Completely impractical but hilarious. Would be significantly more practical if there was a way to have private rooms instead of just making a new one that is inevitably overrun.

Smule's launch-era iPad piano app (maybe it was called 'Magic Piano'?) had a similar feature, but it was only you and one other anonymous person. I thought that was a lot more effective, since if the two of you could figure out how to coordinate without speaking/chatting you could have a really fantastic jam; the massive number of people on this makes it hard to create anything that doesn't resemble complete cacophony.

More fun than playing the piano: following someone's cursor and watching them try to shake you off.

Open multiple tabs and play with the mouse while continuously switching the tabs ( with keyboard shortcut like ctrl+tab)

I'm not going to lie. I did that for a good 5 minutes

Totally true...

It's YOU?

Pretty sweet! I think real-time social collaborative apps like this are going to become more prominent.

Our multi-player beat machine http://eightbitbeats.com

I can't get that to work :(

This is magical, I can't correlate the combination of visual/symbolic/musical elements to any real world analogues. Auditory/musical interactions should be explored by more people in the startup community.

Here's a multi-player synthesizer: http://synth.media.mit.edu/patchwerk/

It seems like there’s a lot of room for expansion in terms of music software and games. Off the top of my head: Allow musicians to attach their instruments to the computer and play duets with friends or strangers. Use software to practice a song and analyze where you make the most mistakes. Make a game out of it – sight reading competitions, short duets, music battles (ala http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-FdX1D5hVg). Vote performances up and down…

The Internet lag is killing it.

Time for a turing-esque test... can you reliably distinguish 50 random people playing a web piano with their mouse from an avant garde piano composition?

I really don't understand why every simple demo of websockets makes it to the front page. Multi-player paint, multi-player piano, multi-player chord riffs... It's all just small variations on the same technology. I don't really see what valuable lesson we're supposed to take away from this when a simple websockets demo makes it to the front page again and again.

Eh, it's still a fairly new technology, it's interesting (and fun) to see what people are doing with it, what it's capable of, and so on.

ok..just wasted two hours.. need a way to select the starting key for your keyboard so you can really rock this thing.

Yeah, definitely need a way to jump up/down an octave.

Hold down shift.

Ah, nice. I still can't get any lower than the bottom row, though.

hold down ctrl

Try the top two rows of keys...

This is the coolest thing.

Another feature request: Chat! So that we can coordinate with each other to play a song!

Nah — that'd be too easy. It's more interesting to see how people learn to communicate solely through the keyboard.

Besides, actually attempting to perform "for real" over the Internet would quickly lead to latency-induced frustration — WLAN MIDI is bad enough!

I actually like the fact that the only way to communicate is by playing sound.

Do ya'll know about the Sugar Project's Collaborative Activities (Sugar is the UI that once was OLPC)? It uses multi-computer DBus Tubes to enable cross system activities: here's their multi-player MIDI environment where kids can jam together via each of their' computers' on screen or real MIDI devices.

It keeps freezing up for me. I can see everyone playing just fine, but as soon as I hit a few notes everything stops and I get "Offline Mode".

Tried Firefox 11 and Chromium 17.0.963.83 (Arch Linux) and Chrome 17.0.963.56 (OS X).

This is actually pretty fascinating. People are making rooms for specific songs (like rickrolling), and people are generally trying to play the requested songs in each of the rooms :)

Could really do with having private hidden rooms, so I can play with a few friends without having the whole world barge in.

You can do this. In the bottom left you can choose among existing rooms or create your own. If you create your own room, you have the option of making it private/hidden (although it seems like it becomes public whenever the server is reset.)

You can also instantly create your own room by adding /[roomname] to the url (although I don't know if this makes them public or private.)

Can you post the keyboard key layout?

look at the js file

var key_binding = { 65: n("gs"), 90: n("a"), 83: n("as"), 88: n("b"), 67: n("c", 1), 70: n("cs", 1), 86: n("d", 1), 71: n("ds", 1), 66: n("e", 1), 78: n("f", 1), 74: n("fs", 1), 77: n("g", 1), 75: n("gs", 1), 188: n("a", 1), 76: n("as", 1), 190: n("b", 1), 191: n("c", 2), 222: n("c#", 2),

		49: n("gs", 1),
		81: n("a", 1),
		50: n("as", 1),
		87: n("b", 1),
		69: n("c", 2),
		52: n("cs", 2),
		82: n("d", 2),
		53: n("ds", 2),
		84: n("e", 2),
		89: n("f", 2),
		55: n("fs", 2),
		85: n("g", 2),
		56: n("gs", 2),
		73: n("a", 2),
		57: n("as", 2),
		79: n("b", 2),
		80: n("c", 3),
		189: n("cs", 3),
		219: n("d", 3),
		187: n("ds", 3),
		221: n("e", 3)
	};

SHIFT and CTROL go UP and DOWN an octave respectively.

Are there any good tutorials that provide an implementation walkthrough of this kind of app?

Didn't work for me in Safari; I had to open Chrome to see any key presses.

Can I set up a private session with only my friends?

Support for an azerty keyboard would be great :)

i somehow feel if you implemented this tech. onto a website multiplayer viewer it'd be really cool. like, reddit for example.

It is more like multiplayer follow the mouse.

Very neat, but my ears do not thank you...