Your plugins
Kontakt, Keyscape, Arturia and any other Audio Unit instrument, each with its own window for picking presets. SoundFonts too, installed from inside the app.
macOS · For the stage and the practice room
Simple and effective. Just connect your MIDI controller to your computer and start playing.
Try it here
The app’s own detector
Try:
What nothing else does
Most detectors pick the most elaborate name that fits. PianoLive picks the one under your fingers.
Your sounds
PianoLive makes sound from the first launch using the bank macOS already has, and grows with you: load your Audio Unit plugins or a sampled SoundFont and blend them across four layers.
Kontakt, Keyscape, Arturia and any other Audio Unit instrument, each with its own window for picking presets. SoundFonts too, installed from inside the app.
Stack piano, strings and organ, or split them across the keyboard. Every layer carries its own EQ, compression and reverb, and a fader with a real meter.
Each module opens only while you are adjusting it and saves as it closes. The screen keeps what you need to see while you play.
Layers, effects, sounds, your MIDI controller and your audio output all come back on their own. You never start from scratch.
At home and on stage
The on-screen keyboard lights what you play and marks the root, with the chord name above it. There is a metronome with tap tempo and an ambient pad held in whatever key you are working on. No controller to hand? Your computer keyboard stands in.
Save each song as a patch and recall it with your foot from a pedalboard, without lifting your hands. The expression pedal rides the volume of whichever layer you assign it to, and if a note ever hangs, one button silences it.
Low latency so the note arrives when the key goes down, a limiter so a big chord will not clip, and a synthesised damper that softens the abrupt stop sampled banks end on.
Specifications
Price
Download the app, type your email, and you have ninety days with everything working: no card, no crippled features, no watermark. If it earns its place, you buy the licence and it is yours for good.
USD29
Questions
The app asks for a licence before it will open again, and that is all. Your patches, sounds and settings sit untouched: activate, and you carry on exactly where you stopped.
Two things: identifying your trial, and issuing your licence to that same address if you buy. There is no password, no account to create, and I neither sell nor share addresses.
macOS does not load VSTs natively; the system format is Audio Unit (AU), and virtually every commercial plugin installs an AU version too. PianoLive loads AU instruments and effects, each with its own preset window.
No. The app uses the bank macOS already ships with, so it makes sound the first time you open it. When you want more, load your plugins or install a sampled SoundFont from inside the app.
Any that macOS recognises without installing drivers, which today is essentially every USB keyboard. And if yours is not to hand, you can play from the computer keyboard.
Neither. PianoLive is the instrument between your controller and the output: it does not record, does not edit, and does not compete with your DAW. That is what keeps it simple to operate.
Yes. It is a universal binary: native on both Apple Silicon and Intel, from macOS 13 onwards.
Normal for now, and it takes a minute. Double-click the app and, when the warning appears, press “Done” (never “Move to Trash”). Then open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, scroll to the Security section and press “Open Anyway” next to the message about PianoLive. Once is enough. On older macOS a right-click was sufficient, but Apple removed that shortcut from Sequoia onwards. The warning goes away once certification with Apple is complete.
No. The app works offline, needs no account and collects no usage data: your email and licence are stored only on your Mac. The one thing that leaves it is a once-a-day check for a newer version, and that request carries nothing about you.