Velo announcements

/purge 7

Velo v2.2

Velo 2.2 — Play with feeling ⌨️

QWERTY velocity — when you play Free play on your computer keyboard, the notes now respond to how you play: faster passages get louder, easing off gets softer, instead of every note being the same flat hit. It drives the visualizer's note glow too.

Fully tunable in Settings → Playing → QWERTY velocity: gain per key, decay, and the soft-to-loud range. Off by default — flip it on and computer-keyboard playing stops feeling dry. (A real MIDI keyboard already sends its own velocity; this is for QWERTY players.)

🙏 Thanks

Big thanks to bartusek and roel for their help shaping the visualizer's customization in Velo 2.1 — the effects, colors and scenes are better because of you. 🙌

⚠️ "My antivirus says keylogger" — false positive

Velo reads your keyboard on purpose — that's how it plays. Antivirus can mistake that for a keylogger. Velo never records or sends your keystrokes — it only checks for updates. It's also unsigned (a code-signing cert costs money and Velo is free). → More info → Run anyway.

⬇️ Install

1. Download Velo-win.zip below
2. Extract anywhere
3. Run Velo.exe

Updating from an older version keeps your library and settings.

Velo v2.2.1

Velo 2.2.1 — Play with feeling ⌨️🎹

Two ways to make Free play on your computer keyboard feel like a real instrument:

⌨️ QWERTY velocity — notes respond to how you play: faster passages get louder, easing off gets softer, instead of every note being the same flat hit. It drives the visualizer's note glow too.

🎹 Sustain pedal (Space) — turn it on and a note stops when you release its key; hold Space as a sustain pedal to let notes ring. No more every note hanging forever.

Both live in Settings → Playing and are off by default — flip them on and computer-keyboard playing stops feeling dry. (A real MIDI keyboard already sends its own velocity and pedal; these are for QWERTY players.)

🙏 Thanks

Big thanks to bartusek and roel for their help shaping the visualizer's customization in Velo 2.1 — the effects, colors and scenes are better because of you. 🙌

⚠️ "My antivirus says keylogger" — false positive

Velo reads your keyboard on purpose — that's how it plays. Antivirus can mistake that for a keylogger. Velo never records or sends your keystrokes — it only checks for updates. It's also unsigned (a code-signing cert costs money and Velo is free). → More info → Run anyway.

⬇️ Install

1. Download Velo-win.zip below
2. Extract anywhere
3. Run Velo.exe

Updating from an older version keeps your library and settings.

Velo v2.3

🎹 Velo 2.3.0 — Play any keyboard

The "playing" sound now comes in 24 instruments. Pick your voice under Settings → Playing → Sound → Piano model.

What's new

• 🎼 24 selectable piano/keyboard sounds — grand, bright & electric pianos, Rhodes & FM, honky-tonk, harpsichord, clavinet, celesta, music box, glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, tubular bells, dulcimer, five organs, accordion, harmonica & tango accordion.
• The core pianos ship offline; the rest stream and cache on first use (needs internet the first time you pick one).
• New Piano model picker in Settings with a hear-it preview — right next to the keyboard one.

Thanks to ÆThosGD for the suggestion 🙏

Install: download Velo-win.zip, extract to your Documents folder, run Velo.exe. Already have Velo? It auto-updates — your songs & settings are kept.

Windows may flag it ("unknown publisher" / keylogger) — that's a false positive. Velo is free and unsigned (a code-signing cert costs ~US$300/yr). Keep the file and run it.

Velo 2.4

🎹 Velo 2.4.0

This release is all about control and flexibility — playing your songs from anywhere, hiding Velo from your stream, and using any piano sound you want.

---

⌨️ Song key-binds — trigger a song with a single key

Right-click any song in your queue (or hit the little keyboard button) and assign it a key. From then on, pressing that key plays that song from anywhere — even while you're inside a game.

• One key = one song. Assign as many as you like.
• Velo won't let you bind a key the player itself types (that would make a song re-trigger itself while playing) — those keys are refused automatically.
• Great for live performance and for triggering backing tracks on the fly.

🎥 Stream mode — hide Velo from OBS, screen-share and screenshots

Turn it on in Settings → Appearance and Velo disappears from your recordings and captures, while staying fully visible on your own screen.

• Hides all of Velo's windows from OBS / screen-share / screenshots (uses Windows' native "exclude from capture").
• Optional sub-toggle to also hide Velo from the taskbar and Alt-Tab, for a completely clean capture.
• Honest about its limits, right in the UI: it stays on your own monitor, the window title can still be listed, and it does not cover a capture card / two-PC setup (that's a second machine filming the screen — nothing on this PC can hide from it).
• Safety net: hiding from the taskbar is only allowed once you've set the "Show / hide Velo" hotkey, so you always have a way to bring it back.

🎼 Bring your own soundfont (.sf2 / .sf3) — use any piano

Load a Keppy Steinway, a concert grand, an organ — literally any SoundFont — without bloating the app.

• Settings → Playing → "Your soundfont" → Load a .sf2 or .sf3 file, and it becomes your live instrument everywhere (Free play, Compose, playback).
• The engine that powers it is tiny (pure JavaScript, ~800 KB). The only weight is your own file, and only while it's selected — remove it and you're back to the built-in sounds instantly.
• SF3 files are far lighter than SF2 for the same sound, so prefer those if you care about RAM.
• Fully opt-in: the default piano sounds are untouched.

🔌 MIDI output guidance — play games like Roblox pianos with Velo

Velo can send its notes to a virtual MIDI cable so games and apps that read MIDI (or that convert MIDI to keystrokes) can be "played" by Velo. This release adds clear in-app guidance and a README section explaining how to set up a virtual MIDI cable (loopMIDI) so it actually works, instead of dead-ending on the Windows built-in synth.

✨ Fixes & polish

• Reliable Show / Hide hotkey — the global show/hide shortcut could previously leave the window stuck behind another app (with no way back if it was also hidden from the taskbar). It now reliably brings Velo to the front every time, even over a full-screen game.
• Dropdown labels fixed — several settings dropdowns could show "Select…" instead of your actual saved choice. Fixed across the board.

---

How to update: download Velo-win.zip below, extract it, and run Velo.exe.

Velo v2.4.1

Velo 2.4.1 — Practice, leveled up 🎹

This one's all about Practice — it looks better, teaches better, and a big community request landed.

🎚️ Sustain in Free play

One Sustain control — a Settings toggle, a Free-play button, and a rebindable hotkey, all synced. Turn it off and preview/QWERTY notes stop at their real length; on and they ring out like before. No more notes stuck ringing during a MIDI preview.

🎨 Sheet — rhythm colours

The letter sheet now shows the rhythm by colour, like the tutorial apps: 🔴 fast · 🟢 slow · 🟠 arpeggio — so you can read the timing at a glance. Toggle it in the Sheet bar. And Sheet now has Fullscreen, with a clean, distraction-free reading mode.

✨ Step looks like the rest

Step mode now runs on the same glowing canvas as Rhythm and Free play (with the note letters) instead of the old grey tiles — while staying self-paced (it waits for the right key). The visualizer customization gear is now in Step and Rhythm too, and the lit keys wear your chosen colour, not a fixed green.

🖥️ Fullscreen fixes

The piano now fills the screen in fullscreen, and a few stuck-highlight glitches between modes are gone.

💡 Faithful heads-up

Pick Faithful on a QWERTY keyboard and a small tip points you to Balanced/Easy — the modes you can actually play by hand.

---
Update: the in-app updater, or download Velo-win.zip below and extract to your Velo folder. Your songs, backgrounds and settings are kept.

Velo v2.4.2

You can now bind a key combo to any action, not just a single key.

Hold Ctrl, Alt and/or Shift, then press your key:

Alt + Shift + F → Show / hide Velo

Why it's great: on a 60% keyboard with no F-keys or numpad, you were running out of keys. Not anymore — every action fits.

Bonus: combos with Ctrl or Alt are safe from Velo's own typing, so you can finally use piano keys for song binds too — Alt + G to fire off a song works now.

Single keys and mouse buttons (M4/M5) still work exactly the same. 👌

💡 Big thanks to <@928453821871587408> (Henrique) for the suggestion — this is your idea shipped!

Grab it in the downloads channel. Keep the ideas coming 🎶

Velo v2.4.3

🎹 Velo 2.4.3 — Stream mode fixes + Scan no longer duplicates

🔒 Stream mode now covers every window

Two windows were slipping through:

• The Select Music window was never hidden from capture — it stayed visible in OBS even with stream mode on.
• The mini-player and Select Music still showed up in Alt-Tab despite the "hide" setting (a conflicting window flag was forcing them back in).

Both fixed and verified against Windows itself, not just assumed — the app reads the state back from the OS on all three windows.

📁 Scan now MOVES files instead of copying

Adding scanned songs used to copy them, leaving every MIDI on your PC twice. It now moves them into your library — no more duplicates.

Undo still has your back: it puts each file back exactly where it came from. If Velo can't tell where a file originated, it leaves it alone rather than deleting it.

🎛️ Want VST quality?

Velo can't host VST plugins itself — but it can play through them. Switch to MIDI Output, install a virtual MIDI cable (loopMIDI), and point Velo at your DAW: Velo drives the notes, your VST makes the sound. There's now a hint about it in Settings → Sound.

(Reminder: you can already load your own SoundFont — Settings → Sound → "Load .sf2 / .sf3".)

Install

Windows: download Velo-win.zip, extract anywhere and run Velo.exe.
Linux: download velo-linux.tar.gz, extract and run ./install-linux.sh.

Velo v2.5.0

Velo 2.5.0 — The Engine Update

The biggest change to how Velo plays since it existed. Almost none of it is a new button — Velo looks the same, then it plays, and you hear it.

The engine

Four things were quietly broken — not missing features, but features that were there, switched on, and doing nothing.

• Chords land together. A five-note chord was five separate trips into the OS, and anything in between rolled it. It now leaves in one call.
• The clock rounded every note onto a 15 ms grid. Wait error: 11 ms → 0.004 ms.
• Extended notes jammed keys in the game. Notes past the main 61 keys are played with Ctrl held, and their release was sent without it — the game never ended the note and the key stayed down.
• Velocity never reached the game. It reads Alt through a delayed callback; Velo sent it with no gap, so the level key was read as an ordinary note. Your dynamics did nothing — and spent four key events per note doing it.

New

• 🆘 Panic — release all keys (Ctrl + Alt + P). Everything held — notes, Shift, Ctrl, Alt, the pedal — lets go without leaving the game.
• 🎭 Expression (Off · Natural · Dramatic) — dynamics read from the music itself. Most MIDI has none, which is why playback sounds like a machine reading a list. Needs a piano with velocity keybinds; ships off.
• 🔄 Fold range (on) — notes past the keyboard move into reach instead of being dropped in silence. One octave at most, never onto a sounding note.
• 🎼 Auto-fit key (off) — moves the whole song into a key that fits. Every interval survives.
• 🪟 Stay in window (on) — Velo learns where you played the first note and holds if you tab away, so a song can never get typed into your Discord chat.
• 🎹 Octaves ×1–×5 — every note as several octaves at once. Fuller, and it looks like both hands are playing.
• 🎚️ Tracks — shows when a song has more than one. Mute the parts you don't want.
• ✨ Flourish — a run across the whole keyboard, on demand, for when someone says you're autoplaying. Three of them, bindable.
• 🎛️ A MIDI keyboard that gets unplugged is waited for and reopened instead of going deaf in silence — and what it held is released, not left down.

📚 Playlists

Named sets of your songs, each in its own order — a full FNAF list in chronological order, a practice set. Drag one onto a tab or use Add songs. Next, previous, shuffle, the end-of-song advance and the floating Select Music window all follow it.

🗑️ A Trash

Removing a song used to un-happen at the next launch: Velo re-reads its Midis folder on startup, and nothing recorded that you meant it. Removed songs now move to Velo/Trash, a real folder, and the Trash button puts them back. Adding one that is already in the trash restores it instead of leaving a copy and a twin in the bin.

🐧 Linux

• Velo now runs on XWayland. It was a native Wayland client, where the compositor forbids the two things Velo is for: putting its window on top, and typing into another app. That is why the mini-player and the autoplayer were dead. Both work again.
• The laptop-heating bug is gone. Velo disabled GPU compositing for every Linux user, so the CPU drew every frame of a 60 fps visualizer.
• velo --doctor — measured facts, not guesses: it really types a character, really moves a window, and says what to do. Runs even when the app won't.
• Ships as velo-linux.tar.gz with an installer, CI-tested on Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch.

✅ Your download

Extract the zip before running it, to a folder you own. Linux: ./install-linux.sh.

Velo is free. Every feature, no paywall.

Velo v2.5.1

A scan could empty your folders with no way back

Velo's Scan finds the MIDIs already on your PC and adds them to your library.
Adding moves the files — on purpose, so a song doesn't end up sitting on your
disk twice.

The problem was what came after. Velo only remembered where each file came from
until you closed the app. Reopen it the next day, find the folders you'd spent
years organising empty, hit Undo — and there was nothing left to undo with.

Nothing was ever deleted. But "it's all still there, somewhere in one flat
folder" is not much comfort when you had it sorted by composer.

Settings › Library now has a "Put back" button. It opens a list of every song
a scan moved and the folder each one goes back to. Tick the ones you want and
they go home. Not the whole import — just what you pick.

It works months later, it survives restarts, and it survives updates.

Also fixed

Removing two songs within a moment of each other gave them the same internal id.
Restore on one brought back both — and Delete forever, the only button in
Velo that really deletes a file, took the song you hadn't selected.

If your Trash already contains a pair like that, Velo repairs it on startup. You
don't have to do anything.

Before you scan

Velo's library is one flat folder. Your own subfolders aren't recreated
inside it. If you've sorted your MIDIs into folders you care about, **keep a copy
first** — Put back will rebuild them, but a copy costs you nothing.

The Scan card says this now too.

Install

Windows — download Velo-win.zip, extract the Velo folder anywhere you
like, run Velo.exe. Windows SmartScreen may warn on first launch: *More info →
Run anyway*. Velo isn't code-signed yet.

Linux — download velo-linux.tar.gz, extract it, and run:

Velo v2.5.2

🍎 Velo runs on Mac now.

That's the headline. After Windows and Linux, Velo 2.5.2 brings macOS — Apple Silicon and Intel, both native, with the permission setup handled for you instead of left as homework.

It's an open beta, and we mean that plainly: every other platform got years of members finding things. This one has had none. It's here so that can start.

🐞 Found something on Mac? Open a ticket on the Discord server — not a message in chat, where it scrolls away. A ticket doesn't get lost, and we can ask you follow-up questions.

Also in this release: four bugs members found, all fixed.

---

⬇️ How to download and open Velo

Find your system below and follow the steps in order — especially on Mac, where step 2 matters more than it looks.

🪟 Windows

1. Download Velo-win.zip from the Assets at the bottom of this page.
2. Right-click the .zip → Properties → tick "Unblock" → OK. Do this before extracting — Windows marks downloaded files, and that mark causes most "it won't start" reports.
3. Extract the folder anywhere: Documents, Desktop, wherever. Don't run it from inside the .zip.
4. Open Velo.exe.

"Windows protected your PC" → click More info → Run anyway. Velo is unsigned: a code-signing certificate costs about US$300 a year, and Velo is free.

Your antivirus called it a keylogger? It isn't, and the reason is honest. Velo reads your keyboard on purpose — that's the whole feature. It turns your typing into piano notes and can play a song into a game's on-screen piano. Technically that's the same low-level trick a real keylogger uses, and heuristics can't tell "makes music" from "steals passwords". Velo never records, stores or sends your keystrokes. You can check yourself: the only thing it ever contacts is GitHub, to look for updates.

If antivirus already removed a file, restore it from quarantine — usually Velo\_internal\pythonnet\runtime\Python.Runtime.dll — and add the Velo folder as an exception.

Requires Windows 10/11 with the WebView2 Runtime, already present on up-to-date Windows.

🍎 macOS

First, which Mac do you have? Apple menu → About This Mac.

• Chip: Apple M1/M2/M3/M4 → take Velo-mac-AppleSilicon.dmg
• Processor: Intel → take Velo-mac-Intel.dmg

The Intel build runs on Apple Silicon through Rosetta. The Apple Silicon build does not run on an Intel Mac at all.

1. Download your .dmg.
2. Open it and drag Velo into the Applications folder — before you open it.
3. Open Applications and double-click Velo. macOS will refuse, because Velo isn't signed with an Apple certificate.
4. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, and click Open Anyway next to the message about Velo. Confirm.
5. Velo will ask for Accessibility. Say yes — this is the permission that lets it press keys in the game. Without it the autoplayer runs and absolutely nothing happens.
6. macOS only applies that permission when an app launches, so Velo notices when you grant it and offers to reopen itself. Let it.

⚠️ Step 2 is not housekeeping. For an unsigned app, macOS ties the permission to where the app is. Open it from Downloads and move it to Applications later, and Velo silently loses that permission — the autoplayer stops working and nothing tells you why.

For the second permission (Input Monitoring, needed by the global hotkeys) and what to do if something looks dead, the full guide is in README-MAC.md.

Two limits that belong to macOS, not to Velo:

• A game in native fullscreen gets a Space of its own, and nothing can appear over it — not Velo, not anything. Keep the game in a window if you want the mini-player on top.
• Non-US keyboard layouts can play the wrong note. The Mac key path resolves

… full notes on GitHub

Velo v2.6.0

WE'RE BACK, BABY 🎹

Not with a patch. With the biggest drop Velo has had.

🎼 MuseScore, straight into your library

This is the one. Open the MIDI Hub, pick MuseScore, search a song or paste a
score link — and it lands in your library, ready to play. No browser, no
downloader site, no account.

• Browse, don't just search. Shelves, instrument and difficulty filters, and

cards that tell you the difficulty and the length before you commit.

• "in the archive · instant". Every score somebody brings in is shared, so

the next person to want it gets it with no waiting at all.

• "you already have this" marks on every source in the Hub — stop

downloading the same arrangement twice.

• Load more actually loads more, and no longer throws you back to the top.

🎚️ Tracks — the control that kept disappearing

Velo could always mute individual tracks. The problem was finding it: the chip
only appeared after you pressed Play, and the song Velo restores on startup
never got one at all. So people concluded the feature didn't exist. It's there
from the moment a song loads now, and when there's nothing to split it says so
instead of vanishing:

• one track → "Everything is on one track, so there is nothing to mute."
• still reading → it tells you it's reading, rather than hiding.

🎥 Recording-friendly mode

Some recorders and capture cards simply cannot see a GPU-drawn window — they
record a black box where Velo should be. Turn this on and Velo draws on the CPU
instead. Settings → Appearance. *(Windows only — it flips a WebView2 flag other
engines don't have.)*

✨ Visualizer

Five separate causes of stutter, all fixed. The worst: the clock ran while the
file was still being parsed — that's the *"the first song after opening always
freezes"* people reported.

Colours are one per track now, read from the file itself (Grand Piano, Bass,
Drum Kit…), up to 16. No more inventing six colours out of your two.

🍎 macOS

• Global hotkeys are back, rebuilt on the API that was always right here.

The one that matters isn't play/pause — it's Panic, your way out when a key
sticks in a game you can't type in.

• ⌘Q no longer walks away with your keys held down. It doesn't fire the

normal close path, so the teardown never ran — you could quit mid-song and
leave keys pressed in the game with nothing pointing back at Velo.

• ⌘V / ⌘A / ⌘Z reach Compose. They were eaten before the page ever saw them,

which made paste, select-all and undo unreachable in an editor.

• Dragging the window to a second monitor works.

🔧 Fixes worth naming

• The sustain pedal could hijack the transport. Velo presses SPACE for the

pedal — and a button you just clicked keeps keyboard focus, where SPACE fires
it again. One click on Next could walk the whole library, playing over itself
the entire way. Velo now refuses to send keys into its own window at all, and
the transport buttons no longer hold focus.

• Two arrangements of the same song no longer overwrite each other. They

shared a filename, so the first silently disappeared and the list kept one
entry pointing at the last. Files are named by arranger now.

• A score called CON, NUL or AUX no longer resolves to a Windows

device instead of a file.

• Velo asks the shared archive before opening any browser window.
• MuseScore import stopped clicking a related-score link instead of the button.
• Velo keeps a real log file now (Documents\Velo\velo.log), so a bug report has

something to look at instead of a description.

📋 Known limits, stated on purpose

• macOS is still a public beta. Drag Velo to Applications before you open

it the first time — permissions are tied to where it lives.

• **On macOS and Linux, a non-US keyboard layout can

… full notes on GitHub

Velo 2.6.1

Velo 2.6.1 — seeking works again

just fixing a bug

Velo v2.6.2

Play the Player's song on the Practice piano.

Your play hotkey now works inside Practice: hit it in any Practice tab and the Player's selected song plays on that piano — lit keys, trails and sound — instead of clicking Play (preview). Made for recording Free play at the Player's own speed and position. Switch to your game and the song goes there, as always.

Also fixed

The MuseScore helper no longer gets stuck on "Reading the score…" when you paste a second link. It now tells a failed read apart from a page that is still loading, gives up in seconds instead of minutes, and swaps in a fresh window when its own goes unreadable.
Linux: the MuseScore and Online Sequencer helper windows no longer appear on screen during a search.

Velo v2.7.0

Velo 2.7.0 is out 🎹

Configs — your whole setup (sound, background, visualizer, keyboard, options) saves as one named preset. Sign in and it follows you to another PC. Publish yours, or try what other people published — one click to apply, one click back to yours.

Hands — click half the keyboard and Velo stops typing that hand: it's yours. Turn on Guide and Velo keeps singing the other one, so you play along instead of alone. Practise one hand at a time, each hand in its own colour, and the falling notes now show only what is actually being played.

Velo also tells you now whether a piece needs one hand, two, four, or is an arrangement nobody can play alone.

Your keyboard — if yours isn't US, Velo now presses the physical key the game expects, and every letter on screen matches your own keyboard.

MIDI out from Practice — send what you play to a DAW or a VST. Velocity and sustain pedal included.

Lighter — idle CPU went from a full core to about 1%. A large song now opens twice as fast and uses a third of the memory.

Also: Transcribe inside the app, Settings rebuilt into five tabs, and letter sheets you can save.

Windows only for now — from this version on, the Linux and macOS builds are paused. Almost everyone using Velo is on Windows, and keeping three builds properly tested costs time I'd rather spend on the app itself. If those platforms ever get a real crowd, they come back. The 2.6.2 builds stay up for anyone who needs them.

⬇️ Download and full notes: <link>
Extract it to Documents before running — not from inside the zip.

<@&1518604777477378228>

Velo v2.7.1

Velo 2.7.1

Fixes, mostly ones you reported.

• Chords were coming out rolled. Sending the velocity level was splitting them apart mid-chord — the chord now takes the level of its loudest note and leaves in one piece.
• Reset Velo (Settings › Library): puts the app back to how it arrives — no songs, no background, default colours and hotkeys. Everything it clears goes to the Recycle Bin.
• Sound off now means silent. With the monitor off, the Guide and the Stage were still playing notes of their own. And with a MIDI port selected, Velo's piano was doubling the port.
• The letter sheet has three colour modes (Rhythm, Hands, Plain), and Save writes the one you're looking at instead of always Rhythm.
• Practice can find your MIDI port. Port names lost the number stuck on the end. A note both hands play is marked for both.
• The console keeps showing what's happening while Velo's own window is in front. Nothing gets typed there, which is deliberate, but the log used to go quiet with it and the app looked frozen.

Most of these came from Yami, who kept reporting things until they were fixed. ob4r found the chord one and worked out on his own which version broke it, that saved me a lot of digging.

Extract Velo-win.zip somewhere normal — Documents is fine, Program Files and OneDrive are not — and run Velo.exe. Windows only, as of 2.7.0.

BIG UPDATE GUYS, PLS CHECK

<@&1518604780082168100>