Pianola

I’ve been using Pianola with a CME WIDI Jack connected directly to the MIDI input of an older (2006ish) PianoDisc player-piano system, and I’m genuinely impressed by what this inexpensive app (no subscription—huge!) has allowed me to do. My PianoDisc hardware is decades old, but the player system itself still works beautifully. With WIDI Jack providing Bluetooth MIDI, Pianola turns my iPhone or iPad into a modern wireless controller. I can play my own standard MIDI collection directly through the piano, bulk-select files, organize playlists, and adjust playback volume and velocity. In my experience, Pianola handles dynamics and volume particularly well. It has effectively breathed new life into otherwise perfectly functional legacy hardware. The weak point is library management. Pianola doesn’t seem to offer a true “All Songs” library view, so everything revolves around playlists. More confusingly, a MIDI file appears able to belong to only one playlist at a time—adding the same file to another playlist causes song counts in existing playlists to change rather than allowing it to appear in both. Accessing MIDI files is also cumbersome. Although iCloud Drive is supported, adding music repeatedly opens the standard iOS Files interface, requiring me to navigate back to iCloud Drive, locate my MIDI folder, and work through its subfolders. There’s no apparent way to designate a folder as a persistent MIDI library root or default location. I’d love to see three improvements: an All Songs/Library view, conventional playlists that allow songs to belong to multiple playlists, and the ability to set a default MIDI folder in iCloud Drive or local storage. Those shortcomings aside, the actual MIDI playback is excellent. The fact that Pianola plus a WIDI Jack can make my old PianoDisc feel like a modern wireless player piano is pretty remarkable. Highly recommended for owners of legacy player-piano hardware—just be prepared to work around the library interface.