Troubleshooting

No microphone detected

If Options shows a warning banner instead of picking up sound:

1. Confirm your OS actually sees the microphone (check your system’s sound settings outside Harmonicon first).
2. Open Options → Microphone and try selecting a different device from the dropdown — some systems expose the same physical mic under several names (e.g. a generic “default” entry alongside the specific hardware name), and only one of them may actually be live.
3. If you plug in or unplug a mic while Harmonicon is running, revisit this dropdown afterward — the device list doesn’t always refresh itself.

Notes aren’t registering, or the wrong pitch registers

• Try a different pitch-detect algorithm (Options → Pitch detect). Different algorithms trade off differently between low-note accuracy, responsiveness, and noise tolerance — if one struggles with your particular mic/harmonica/room combination, another often won’t.
• Play closer to the microphone, and closer to the harmonica than to your mouth — breath noise close to a laptop mic is a common source of bad reads.
• Use headphones instead of speakers. Backing-track or metronome audio leaking back into the mic can be misread as a note.
• Very low-pitched harmonicas (low-keyed diatonics, the low end of a chromatic) need a detector range wide enough to cover them — this is handled automatically per-chart, but if a specific low note never registers, double check the chart’s declared harmonica key matches the harp you’re actually playing.

Timing feels consistently early or late

Run Calibrating Input Lag once — a mismatched Input Lag offset shows up as every hit reading a bit early or a bit late, even when your actual playing is on the beat. The results screen after any scored song also offers a one-click “apply the measured offset” button if you notice this without visiting the calibration screen directly.

A chart won’t load

Harmonicon checks a chart’s declared metadata.format_version against what the current build’s loader understands, and refuses to load anything declaring a version newer than that, with a clear error naming both versions — rather than failing on a confusing, unrelated error further into loading. If you see this, update Harmonicon, or double-check the chart’s format_version field wasn’t set higher than it should have been.

An older chart is a different story: Harmonicon automatically fixes up a handful of known old-format issues (like a leftover field from a since- removed feature) the moment it loads the file, so an old chart just works without you needing to edit it by hand. This happens silently in memory — it doesn’t rewrite the file on disk — unless you also save it again from the Song Editor, at which point the fixed-up version is what gets written.

The game feels stuttery or slow

• Practice Speed (pause menu, 50%–100%) slows the highway/metronome down without pitch-shifting audio — useful for a genuinely hard passage, but won’t fix an actual performance problem.
• Play 3D renders more than Play 2D; if performance is the issue rather than difficulty, try Play 2D instead.