playing keyboard using audacity

I don’t want to record, I just want to hear my keyboard through my computer while I"m playing. I have it hooked up correctly. How do I use Audacity to hear what I’m playing on Windows?

I have it hooked up correctly.

And how’s that? With USB? With some kind of analog connection?

Note that Audacity isn’t really a MIDI application and it can’t use a MIDI connection. If you’re using USB, the keyboard has to support USB audio, or you’ll need a MID application.

OK, if you have hooked this up to your USB-MIDI port, this is probably NOT going to happen. Audacity does NOT currently support USB-MIDI. There may be other free software that DOES support a USB-MIDI connection. Have you tried Musescore, Piano Time, Piano 10, MidiEditor, Cakewalk…

However, if your keyboard has a headphone jack, you can hook this up through a USB audio adapter such as the Behringer UCA 202/222, etc.

Report back what you end up doing. Others will read this and will want to know. What is the make and model of your keyboard?

I did it with CakeWalk and a PC. CakeWalk will accept MIDI commands from the keyboard and translate them into musical notes. The catch is it will play musical notes. To record them, you have to configure Audacity to record music playing on the computer.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_audio_playing_on_the_computer.html

I can also record the headphone connection from either of my stand-alone Yamaha keyboards. Both of them have speakers and will play music to a room by themselves.

https://www.kozco.com/tech/organfinale.mp3

A note about MIDI. Everybody thinks it’s a sound format. It’s not. It’s machine control. It will create the instructions so your application or computer can make the sound. And at least in the case of CakeWalk, it doesn’t have to be the sound burned into the song. I used to like playing my piano songs on the guitar. That’s a simple change in CakeWalk.

A more creative problem might be the guitar you created your song on may not be the guitar in the MIDI playback.

Koz