The Synthesia piano forum is down. Here are the answers
The community forum at synthesiagame.com/forum has been offline for months. Verified again on 2026-08-11: the operator's own notice cites botnets making nearly a million server requests a day. Their support page still links to it, so people keep arriving at a dead end. These are the questions it used to carry.
Klaviero needs a MIDI keyboard and Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Opera on a desktop or laptop. It cannot run in Safari or on an iPhone or iPad, because Apple does not support the Web MIDI API and requires every iOS browser to use Safari's engine. Full requirements.
Why is the forum down
The operator's notice says the forum was taken offline because of botnet traffic running at nearly a million requests a day. It is a hosting problem, not an abandoned product: Synthesia the piano software is still sold and still supported directly. This page is not a claim that Synthesia is going away.
What it does mean in practice is that the searchable archive of eighteen years of piano-software questions is not answering anybody today.
My keyboard is not detected
On any USB MIDI keyboard, the order matters: plug the keyboard in first, then open the application. A device connected after the app has started is the single most common cause of a keyboard that "does not work".
In a browser there is a second step. Since Chrome 124 in April 2024 the whole Web MIDI API sits behind a permission prompt, so the browser asks once and the dialog is the browser's, not the app's. If you dismissed it, reload and allow it.
If the keyboard has a USB-B socket and a MIDI DIN pair, use USB. The DIN sockets need a separate interface and the cheap ones are where most of the trouble comes from.
Where do I get MIDI files, and are they legal
The public-domain classical repertoire is genuinely free: the works are out of copyright and so are faithful transcriptions of them. A modern arrangement of a modern song is not, whoever is hosting the file.
Klaviero ships 4,296 classical charts, 2,907,841 notes in total, every one of them measured and both hands separated. You can also load your own MIDI files.
Nothing runs on my iPad
If you are trying to use a browser-based piano app on an iPad, it cannot work. Apple does not implement the Web MIDI API and requires every iOS browser to use Safari's engine, so Chrome on iOS is Safari in a different coat. Synthesia has a native iPad app, which is the answer on that device. Klaviero does not, and will not until Apple ships Web MIDI.
Is there a browser alternative
Klaviero runs in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Opera with nothing to install, scores every note PERFECT to MISS, and publishes the measured difficulty of every chart. It is a different shape from Synthesia rather than a copy of it, and the honest comparison is here, including the three things Synthesia does better.
Try it on this one
Für Elise (complete) · L. van Beethoven · 1,041 notes · 2:45 · peak 9.3 n/s. It is on the free tier, so it needs no card. Plug the keyboard in and press play.