vmpk
Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard (VMPK) is a free, open-source software synthesiser interface that emulates a piano keyboard for MIDI input and output. Musicians, composers and producers use it to control DAWs, virtual instruments and hardware synthesisers via keyboard and mouse input, without needing a physical MIDI controller. VMPK supports keyboard mapping, octave shifting, velocity control and MIDI note output, making it useful for sketch compositions, live performance triggering and MIDI testing. It is cross-platform and available on Windows, macOS and Linux.
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1 suggestionVMPK does not yet have a native Apple Silicon build — the current release (0.9.2) runs only under Rosetta 2 on M-series Macs, consuming significantly more RAM and CPU than a native build would. A feature request for ARM64 support was filed in 2021, but the search results show no subsequent updates from the maintainers confirming that a native build is in development or planned. Since VMPK is open-source and hosted on SourceForge, you should check the project's issue tracker and recent commits on the repository to see if there has been any progress since 2021. If no native build appears before Apple removes Rosetta 2 in macOS 28 (September 2028), the app will stop launching entirely on that release. For now, the Intel build continues to work under Rosetta, but given the two-year gap without a response to the ARM64 request, you may want to begin exploring alternative MIDI keyboard tools that already offer native Apple Silicon support — for example, open-source tools like Patroneo or commercial offerings like MainStage (part of GarageBand on newer Macs).
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