Support

Email safabulatdev@icloud.com — a real person reads it.

Where is the window?

Deskestra has no dock icon on purpose. Click its icon in the menu bar — five little pipes over a keyboard — and choose Show / Hide. Everything else lives in that same menu: the instrument switcher, the voice picker, volume, theme and the metronome switch.

I hear nothing

• Check the Volume slider in Deskestra's menu, then your Mac's own output volume and the selected output device.
• Deskestra plays the General MIDI bank that comes with macOS. If your system sounds are working, Deskestra's should be too.
• If only one instrument is silent, try switching its Voice and back.

The keyboard maps

Every instrument is mapped to physical keys, and each key, tine or drum is labelled with the letter your own keyboard prints on it. The maps below use the letters on a Turkish Q board; on a US, French or German layout the letters differ but the fingering is identical.

• Piano — seventeen white keys, C3 to E5. They run along the top row Q…U and then the whole bottom row Z onward, out to its last three keys. Sharps sit on the row above each: 23 567 over the top row, and SD GHJ LŞ over the bottom one.
• Drums — one cluster your hands never leave, three rows:
  E R T Y U — crash, tom 1, tom 2, floor tom, crash
  D F G H J — clap, kick, snare, open hat, ride
  V B N — kick, rim, closed hat
  Pairs stack in a column on purpose: the kick answers to both F and V, and the snare's two voices (G and the quiet rim B) and the hat's two (H open, N closed) each sit one above the other, so switching within a pair is a finger dropping a row rather than a hand moving.
  A plain 4/4: hi-hat N on the eighths, snare G on 2 and 4, kick F on 1 and 3. Then roll R T Y for a fill.
• Bass — one keyboard row per string, nine keys long: the number row is the G string, the top row is D, the home row is A and the bottom row is E. The leftmost column is the open string, then eight frets.
• Guitar — majors Q–U (C to B), minors A–J. Pick a chord, then strum by moving the pointer across the strings.
• Kalimba — fifteen tines, two octaves of C major. The lowest note is the long tine in the middle and answers to two keys, one on each row; from there the top row fans out to the left and the bottom row to the right, so a key's place on the keyboard matches its tine's place on the board. Or just brush the pointer across them — nothing you hit is a wrong note.
• Metronome — Space start and stop, T tap tempo, ←→ ±1 BPM (hold ⇧ for ±10), ↑↓ ±5, and 1–8 to set the beats in a bar.
• Tuner — ←→ change the reference pitch.

The tuner says NO INPUT or TOO QUIET

• NO INPUT means macOS hasn't given Deskestra the microphone. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone and switch Deskestra on.
• TOO QUIET means the microphone is working but the sound isn't reaching it. Play a little louder or move closer — the level meter beside the label shows what it can hear.
• SEARCHING means it can hear something but hasn't found a steady pitch yet, which usually means room noise rather than a note.

The metronome keeps playing after I switch instruments

That's deliberate — it's how you practise to a click while playing the piano. Turn it off from the Metronome item in the menu bar, or from the metronome's own Stop button.

Do I have to pay for any of the instruments?

No. All seven are included and there is nothing to buy — no in-app purchase, no subscription, no trial. If you are looking for a Restore Purchases button, there isn't one, because there is nothing to restore.

Something is wrong, or something is missing

Write to safabulatdev@icloud.com. Telling me your macOS version, which instrument, and what you expected to happen makes it much faster to fix. Feature requests are genuinely welcome — most of what's in Deskestra arrived that way.