Menu Band
Taking macOS' standard instruments out of the 🎸 Garage and kickin' it on the curb!
A tiny piano lives in the right side of your menu bar. Click the keys, type letters, or pipe notes to your DAW over MIDI — Menu Band publishes a virtual MIDI source named Menu Band that any DAW can pick as input. When nothing's listening, a built-in General MIDI synth covers hundreds of patches.
“i use it on my macbook neo. practice notepat, play ableton without leaving my menu bar.”
— @jeffrey
Three modes
- PointerMouse only. Two octaves.
- NotepatType to play. Two octaves.
- AbletonType to play. Live's M-mode layout.
What's new 1.2
Type music into Stickies. Any sticky whose body starts with mb<N> becomes a live keyboard for GM instrument N — type mb5 hhg mb6 hhih and the first chunk plays as instrument 5, the second as 6. Inline mb<N> tokens mid-text switch instruments on the fly; backspace and arrows keep their normal repeat.
Two-finger swipe scrolls the octave. Swipe over the menubar piano icon and the octave steps incrementally — first 16 px of motion already moves it, so it feels responsive instead of waiting for a full flick. Scoped to the icon only, so scrolls in the popover and floating panel still scroll their content normally.
Plus: the score view sits flush against the popover (no tinted backdrop strip), the octave readout pins to the top-right with a sharp theme-aware drop shadow, and the About panel now shows a scannable QR code for prompt.ac/menuband.
Recent changes
- loading…
Requirements
macOS 11+ · Apple Silicon · ⌃⌥⌘P toggles typing mode.