this is a cool thing<p>it doesn't work as well as you'd hope with a usb keyboard without n-key rollover (nkro), and because it doesn't eat control characters (but uses the control and shift keys for percussion), it has a tendency to tempt you to run unexpected browser commands by accident. did you know what ctrl-shift-a does in firefox? well, you do now<p>from the name i was expecting it to have some kind of pattern-recording and playback ability, which would make it possible to play music even on such limited input devices<p>the <i>keyboard</i> keyboard layout is not isomorphic the way the screen layout is; a purely horizontal keyboard layout for a whole octave (either a whole chromatic octave, maybe on the qwer tyui op() row, or just a whole octave of naturals like on a piano's white keys) would greatly diminish the problem with keyboard rollover<p>i think that, if you're doing an ortholinear isomorphic keyboard layout of 12-tet, especially for people to just mess around with rather than playing seriously, you might be better off with six notes per row rather than four. that way, perfect fifths like c/g are vertically aligned. on this four-notes-per-row layout, you instead have major thirds, which are not quite as desirable for people to stumble across as they're messing around. and fifths are kind of in the worst possible location, a knight's move. major thirds are still probably the second-best thing after fifths though<p>there are more interesting isomorphic keyboard programs out there; <a href="https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.gitorious.jamesjrh.isokeys/" rel="nofollow">https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.gitorious.jamesjrh.isoke...</a> (<a href="https://github.com/lrq3000/hexiano">https://github.com/lrq3000/hexiano</a>) is one free-software implementation for android<p>i suspect the paucity of waveforms in notepat is due to the fact that the web audio api only has a few builtin waveforms, all of which suck. but with software synthesis it's easy to get really interesting musical timbres. <a href="https://za3k.github.io/ha3k-14-synth/" rel="nofollow">https://za3k.github.io/ha3k-14-synth/</a> is a demo i did with za3k which generates a series of samples in js (using an html5 api that is unfortunately deprecated without any adequate replacement). i have more notes on bytebeat at <a href="http://canonical.org/~kragen/bytebeat/" rel="nofollow">http://canonical.org/~kragen/bytebeat/</a>, but it can be hard to get it to sound the way you want; other more tractable but simple ways of getting nicer sounds include karplus-strong synthesis <a href="http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/ks-string.c" rel="nofollow">http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/ks-string.c</a> (one-line version in <a href="http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/ks1.c" rel="nofollow">http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/ks1.c</a>), flanging <a href="http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams.html" rel="nofollow">http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams.html</a>, and fm synthesis <a href="http://www.codemist.co.uk/AmsterdamCatalog/" rel="nofollow">http://www.codemist.co.uk/AmsterdamCatalog/</a><p>(disclaimer: i know nothing about music)