Synthesia is a good piece of software with two hard requirements, and almost everyone searching for an alternative has run into one of them. It needs a MIDI file for every song beyond the roughly 150 it ships with, and it needs a MIDI keyboard to know what you played. Miss either and the app still runs, it just stops doing the thing you wanted.
One app removes both requirements at once, which is why it is our pick here: Anything Piano writes the notes from the recording, so there is no file to find, and it listens through the microphone as well as over MIDI, so there is no keyboard to buy. This guide covers it first, then the alternatives that solve one of the two, then how to decide between them.
A note on who is writing: we make Songscription, and our team also makes Anything Piano. Both appear below, alongside the alternatives we would recommend over them in the cases where they fit better.
What Synthesia Needs From You
Synthesia is a MIDI player with a practice layer on top. That design is what makes it fast, cheap, and endlessly extensible, and it is also the source of both constraints.
A MIDI file for every song
Synthesia does not transcribe anything. It reads note data that already exists, so the built-in library plus whatever MIDI you can find is the whole universe of what you can practice. For popular classical and mainstream pop, files are usually out there. For a specific cover, a live arrangement, a game soundtrack deep cut, or a song released last month, they often are not, and the ones you do find are frequently someone's rough sequence rather than the arrangement you heard. Our Songscription vs Synthesia comparison covers that gap in more detail.
A MIDI keyboard to check your playing
Synthesia detects your notes over MIDI and does not listen through a microphone. On an acoustic upright or a grand you can still watch the notes fall and play along, but the app has no idea whether you hit them, so scoring and wait mode are off the table. Most apps in this category went the other way and analyze sound from the mic, which is the single biggest practical difference between Synthesia and the rest.
The Alternatives at a Glance
| Alternative | Where songs come from | How it hears you | Removes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anything Piano | Any song ever recorded | Mic, Bluetooth MIDI, USB MIDI | Both constraints |
| flowkey | Fixed catalog, 1,500+ songs | Microphone or MIDI | The keyboard requirement |
| Skoove | Fixed catalog | Microphone or MIDI | The keyboard requirement |
| Simply Piano | Fixed catalog | Microphone or MIDI | The keyboard requirement |
| Piano Marvel | Method library and repertoire | MIDI only | Neither, it adds curriculum |
| Songscription | Any recording, file or link | Nothing, it does not listen | The missing MIDI file |
The Alternatives
Anything Piano, the closest replacement
Anything Piano is the option that removes both constraints at once, which is why it belongs at the top of a Synthesia list rather than in the middle of one. It keeps the format you came for, notes falling toward a keyboard with the hands color-coded, and changes where the notes come from. You give it a song as an audio file, a YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram link, or a live recording, and a transcription model writes the piano part from the audio, producing a piano tutorial for a song that may never have had one. No MIDI file to find, because none is required.
On input it is a superset of Synthesia rather than a swap: Bluetooth MIDI and USB MIDI both work, so your existing keyboard connects exactly as it does now, and the microphone works too, which means the acoustic piano Synthesia could never hear is finally in play. The practice controls map onto what you already use: a speed control that runs from a quarter of real time up to double, with presets from slowest to fast, a wait mode that holds each group of notes until you play it, looping between any two notes, and hand toggles for practicing one hand at a time. If slowing the original recording down is really all you wanted, Songscription vs Amazing Slow Downer covers the tools built for that job.
It goes further than Synthesia on practice, too. The loop is set by tapping the first and last note of the passage rather than by dragging a bar, it calibrates to your keyboard's key count (49, 61, 76, or 88) so the display matches your hands, and it asks whether you want the piano exactly as played or a piano version of a full band track, a choice a downloaded MIDI file has already made for you.
Two limits are worth stating. It is on iPhone and iPad today, with a waitlist for Android and web, so a desktop-first Synthesia user is changing platform. And it shows a piano roll: sheet music is in development, so if you want printable notation alongside the falling notes, run Songscription on the same recording and you will have a score in minutes.
flowkey, if you are on Android or want human arrangements
flowkey trades the open-ended MIDI universe for a curated one, and the curation is the point. Its 1,500-plus songs are arranged at several difficulty levels, so a piece can meet you at your level instead of arriving at full difficulty, and each comes with video of a pianist's hands, which solves the fingering problem falling notes leave open. It listens by mic or MIDI, and it runs on Android. Choose it if the MIDI files you have been downloading are technically playable and musically rough, which is a common complaint after a few months in Synthesia. The trade is that 1,500 curated songs is still a fixed set.
Skoove and Simply Piano, if you want to be taught
Synthesia is a practice tool rather than a teacher, and it does not claim otherwise: it has no opinion about your fingering or your posture. If instruction is what you actually want, Skoove and Simply Piano both run graded courses, teach notation properly, drill the scales and technique a falling-notes app never touches, and listen through the microphone. This is also the honest answer if your goal is to read music, which no piano roll teaches, ours included. You are trading freedom of repertoire for structure, which is a good trade for a lot of people. Our roundup of Simply Piano alternatives covers that side of the field in more depth.
Piano Marvel, if you are working with a teacher
Piano Marvel keeps Synthesia's MIDI requirement and adds everything Synthesia deliberately leaves out: a sequenced method, sight-reading assessment, and progress reporting a teacher can act on. It is the natural upgrade for a student whose lessons have gotten serious, and overkill for someone who wanted to play a game theme by Friday.
How to Choose
- You want the falling-notes format without either constraint: Anything Piano. It writes the notes from the recording and accepts mic, Bluetooth MIDI, and USB MIDI, so neither the file nor the keyboard is a gate.
- You are attached to your desktop setup and just need songs: stay in Synthesia and generate the missing MIDI file from the recording with Songscription, which imports straight into it.
- You are on Android: flowkey or Skoove until the Anything Piano waitlist opens up.
- You want scales and graded technique: Skoove or Piano Marvel. No falling-notes app drills fundamentals, Synthesia included.
- You want printable sheet music: Songscription, alongside whichever app you practice in.
If you are weighing the whole category rather than just the Synthesia-shaped hole in it, our guide to the best piano learning apps lays the field out side by side, and learning piano without a MIDI keyboard goes further into the acoustic case.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best alternative to Synthesia?
Anything Piano. It removes both of Synthesia's constraints at once: it writes the piano part from any recording, so there is no MIDI file to hunt down, and it accepts microphone as well as Bluetooth and USB MIDI, so an acoustic piano gets real feedback. Choose flowkey or Skoove instead if you want to learn from notation, if you are on Android, or if you want graded technique drills.
Can I use Synthesia without a MIDI keyboard?
You can watch the falling notes and play along on any piano, but Synthesia will not know what you played. It detects notes over MIDI only and does not listen through a microphone, so scoring, wait mode, and accuracy feedback all require a MIDI-capable instrument connected by USB or Bluetooth.
How do I get a MIDI file for a song Synthesia does not have?
Convert the recording yourself instead of hunting forums for a file that may not exist. Songscription turns an audio file or a YouTube link into MIDI, which imports into Synthesia directly. That works for covers, live takes, and obscure tracks, which is exactly the material a general MIDI archive is missing.
Is there a Synthesia that works with an acoustic piano?
Yes. Anything Piano shows the same falling notes and listens through your device microphone, so it knows whether you hit the right note on an upright or a grand with no cable at all, and it still accepts your MIDI keyboard when you want it. flowkey, Skoove, Simply Piano, and Yousician also use microphone detection, but all four teach from fixed catalogs.
Final Thoughts
Synthesia earned its place by being the first tool to make falling notes feel like a legitimate way to learn, and the criticism it still attracts, that note-matching is not real musicianship, was always a bit unfair to the people it helped. Plenty of players learned their first pieces there and went on to read music properly. What has changed is not the format. It is that the format no longer has to be fed by a file somebody else made.
That is the shift worth taking seriously when you pick a replacement. For twenty years the practical limit on what you could learn from falling notes was the MIDI archive, and the skill you developed alongside piano was a kind of file archaeology: which forum, which uploader, which of six versions is not a MIDI of a MIDI of a cover. Models that read audio directly have deleted that entire step. The question is no longer whether someone once sequenced the song you want. It is only whether a recording of it exists, and it does.
