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Getting Started

Running Harmonicon

Harmonicon is a native desktop application (Windows, macOS, Linux — see the project’s release page or your package manager for a prebuilt binary). If you’re building from source:

cargo run --release

You’ll need a display, audio output, and a microphone — Harmonicon listens to your harmonica through the mic the same way it plays music through your speakers/headphones.

What you need to play

  • A harmonica. Diatonic (10-hole, any key) and chromatic (12- or 16-hole) harmonicas are both fully supported. If you don’t have one yet, a diatonic harp in the key of C is the standard beginner’s choice and matches most of the bundled Lessons content.
  • A microphone. A laptop’s built-in mic works, but a dedicated mic (even a cheap USB one) picking up less room noise will make pitch detection noticeably more reliable. Position it close to the harmonica, not close to your mouth.
  • Headphones are recommended over speakers — they stop the backing track/metronome from bleeding into the mic and being misread as notes you played.

Picking your microphone

Harmonicon uses whatever input device your system reports as default, but you can pick a specific one from Options → Microphone: a dropdown lists every input device your system exposes. If the game shows a “no microphone” warning banner, open Options and confirm a working device is selected — see Troubleshooting if none of them pick up sound.

Before your first scored song, it’s worth a quick trip to Calibrating Input Lag — every microphone and audio setup has a slightly different delay between the sound leaving your harmonica and Harmonicon detecting it, and correcting for it is a one-time, 30-second step that makes every subsequent judged note more accurate.

Adding your own content

Harmonicon also reads from ~/Harmonicon (a folder in your home directory) as a second source of songs and themes, alongside what ships with the game — drop a song folder or a theme folder in there and it shows up in the song list / theme picker without needing to reinstall anything. See Song Editor for how to author a chart of your own.

A song folder only strictly needs one thing: a .harpchart file (any filename) inside its song/ subfolder. Everything else is optional — background.png, song/*.ogg for the backing track, and the 2d//3d/ note art folders — Harmonicon fills in a generated background, plays no backing track, and falls back to the selected note theme respectively for whatever’s missing, rather than refusing to load the song.