How Do I Add a Piano Roll and Note Highway to Music Visuals?

In BeamTracer Performer, add TRACK, turn SPECIMEN on, and add SCORE ROLL or NOTE HIGHWAY under WIDGETS. Load the song's MIDI file with LOAD MIDI to supply its exact notes and tempo. The score follows playback beside the visualizer and can be included in a rendered MP4 or WebM.

Hi, I'm Trina with BeamTracer.com. Watch the notes on the left as the jellyfish moves. The piano roll lets you see what's coming; the highway sends those same notes toward you. Both follow the MIDI file made for this song.

SCORE ROLL and NOTE HIGHWAY over Model Pulse in its WIDE view. The examples use an original 24.6-second track and matching MIDI file; these demonstrations are silent.

How do I add a MIDI piano roll to a visualizer?

Add the score widgets inside TRACK → SPECIMEN, then load the audio and its matching MIDI file. MIDI supplies note events; your main audio track supplies playback and the sound in a rendered video. The MIDI file is not a replacement audio track.

What changes between a piano roll, note highway and keyboard?

SCORE ROLL puts note lengths on a piano-roll timeline, with one bar behind the playhead and three ahead. NOTE HIGHWAY sends notes down twelve lanes, one per note name. NOTE KEYS lights the notes while they sound and names the key and current chord.

The widget changes from SCORE ROLL to NOTE HIGHWAY to NOTE KEYS while the audio timeline continues. The source files stay the same.

The highway's SCORE and COMBO count drum hits landing on the beat grid. They are not a grade for how accurately you played a MIDI keyboard. For the bar number, tempo and song section, add BAR CLOCK.

How do I line up a MIDI file with the song?

Use ALIGNMENT (s) in the loaded MIDI row. A positive value starts the notes later against the audio. REPLACE MIDI selects another file, while REMOVE clears the loaded note data. Keep the main track loaded while comparing alignment.

A closer view of the native panel. The loaded file shows 128 pitched notes at 120 BPM. This example uses ALIGNMENT 0 because its audio and MIDI were made together.

BeamTracer reads beat-timed Standard MIDI Files in formats 0 and 1, up to 8 MB. Drum-channel notes are excluded from the pitched-note display. If a file cannot be read, the MIDI row explains the problem and keeps the file you already had loaded.

Can the widgets show more than notes?

Yes. LOUDNESS STRIP shows the whole track's waveform and loudness, BAND CONSTELLATION follows nine frequency bands, and SIGNAL TRIO combines a waveform, bands and stereo vectorscope. STEM RIBBONS follows uploaded stems, or five groups of frequency bands when no stems are loaded.

Four signal widgets on the same track. No stems are loaded here, so STEM RIBBONS uses frequency-band groups.

Use UI PLACEMENT under LAYOUT to arrange the widgets. UI SCALE in SPECIMEN ADVANCED changes their size. Start with one or two widgets so the notes have room to be read.

UI SCALE changes from 1.00 to 1.45 to 1.80 on a four-widget LEFT COLUMN arrangement.

Do I need a MIDI file or a connected keyboard?

A MIDI file is optional. The score widgets use the loaded MIDI file first, then uploaded stems, then notes estimated from the audio track. Estimated notes are most useful on clear melodic parts or isolated stems. In SCORE ROLL, less certain audio estimates appear fainter.

A connected MIDI controller can also supply notes live. Those live notes appear while you perform, but are not included in a rendered video. For a repeatable score export, use file-based note data. Live microphone input has no upcoming track to read and supplies no detected notes of its own. The score-widget reference explains these source choices.