WELCOME to KEEN LITTLE RABBIT EARS

Keen little rabbit ears is a simple ear training program for Linux and Windows. It is free of charge. You can exercise the recogniton of intervalls, chords, scales and chord progressions.

Keen little rabbit ears requires the installation of Perl (Version 5), Perl/Tk, Perl::MIDI and an extermal MIDI player, like timidity (Verion 0.2i). Keen little rabbit ears is written in perl, uses Perl/Tk for the user interface, Perl::MIDI to write MIDI files and timidity to play MIDI files.

This is an early release, which means that there is a number of features which are not implemented. But keen little rabbit ears works pretty fine on my Pentium 90 using Suse Linux (Version 6.1) and under Window 95 too.

Screenshots: MainWindow DrillWindow

Things to download:

Keen little rabbit ears Version 0.8

The README file

The config file

The changelog file

The LSM file

HOW TO INSTALL (WINDOWS)

  1. If you do not have DCOM, download it from Microsoft. Then install it.
  2. Download ActivePerl from ActiveState. Then install it.
  3. Download Perl/Tk. This can be done easily. Just go to your bin directory of your perl installation and start ppm.bat. Enter "install Tk". You will be connected to the internet and the software will be downloaded and installed. If that fails, download Tk.zip by hand from activeState and uncompress it. Save Tk.ppm to C:\temp\Tk.ppm. Then type "ppm install c:\temp\Tk.ppm" in a DOS-box. I hope this will work.
  4. Next download Perl::MIDI from CPAN or from here. Extract it and move the file MIDI.pm to the lib directory of your perl installation. Also move the MIDI directory there.
  5. You need a programm which can play MIDI files. If you already have a MIDI player that can be started from the commandline, does not pop up a window and exits after playing, skip this point. Otherwise download and install a MIDI player. Here you can find timidity (commandline version) for Windows. To keep the file small I only added the piano sound (patch). You will not hear any other instrument until you install the complete patch set and configure timidity accordingly. But this is up to now not necessary.
  6. Download KeenLittleRabbitEars, uncompress it and create a new directory named "KeenLittleRabbitEars". move all files there. Open keenlittlerabbitears.pl with a text editor (notepad should work) and adjust the variables to your system requironments. It is all documented, so this should not be to hard.
All in all you need to download approx.

HOW TO INSTALL (LINUX / UNIX)

  1. Perl is usually installed on every running Linux / Unix system
  2. Download Perl/Tk and Perl::MIDI. Visit CPAN. Download the relevant files, extract them and follow the included installation hints. Usually this results in running configure, make, make install. For Suse Linux (V. 6.1) perl/Tk can be installed directly from the CDs. You can also download Perl::MIDI from here. If you have installed the CPAN module, just enter:
    perl -MCPAN -e shell
    install Tk
    install MIDI
  3. You need a programm which can play MIDI files. If you already have a MIDI player that can be started from the commandline, does not pop up a window and exits after playing, skip this point. Otherwise download and install a MIDI player. Timidity++ can be downloaded from here. Or use xarchie and search for timidity-0.2i. You also can download it from here. Follow the included installation instructions. Be shure to install timidity and additionally add at least the acpiano.pat file. This should be included in the timidity package. You can find other MIDI players at Sound & MIDI Software For Linux.
  4. Download KeenLittleRabbitEars and uncompress it. Open keenlittlerabbitears.pl with a text editor and adjust the variables to your system requironments. It is all documented, so this should not be to hard.

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Ear training resources on the web

Other ear training programs

Pleaser note: Some of the names given below are trademarks and all rights belong to their owners. Clicking on the links opens a new windows. I am not responsible for the content of the linked pages below. See also this disclaimer. If you want more information about ear trainings programs visit Douglas Spangler´s Homepage.

Cheers Matthias Nutt