Hi,
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Originally Posted by drpharmer
So are you saying that all audio to MIDI conversions will be highly inaccurate?
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Unfortunately pretty much. It's a really complex task if you stop and think about it, and our ears and brains are the best tools on the planet for the job.
Taking any audio file and trying to separate out
- the instruments or voices (different instruments/voices playing the same note pitch or chordal notes),
- the notes themselves (determining what is a root note versus the harmonics),
- the root pitch (versus vibrato or reverb),
- the duration (whether the note is still playing or if that’s some ringing echo in the recording)
- and a host of other nuances
is a very, very difficult technological task.
Our ears and brains work in an incredibly complex way to discern all these aspects of music.
Getting a program to do the same thing, and then produce a MIDI file (the “directions” for playing the piece) so that we can get sheet music is still a goal yet to be fully realized. There are a number of programs that claim to do this, but in all the testing we’ve done, none of them do a good enough job to produce a MIDI that doesn’t still need a lot of work to give decent sheet music.
Even the Melodyne Editor, which does an absolutely amazing job of separating audio tones, still doesn’t give a very good MIDI file for getting sheet music. It separates out a lot of the individual audio elements, but still can't differentiate between different instruments to put them into their own MIDI track/staff, and the MIDI output is not in any sort of usable timing format.
It's not that smart folks aren't trying their best, it's just a very difficult task to do well.
Your method of using a tool to help with getting proper pitches and then using Transcribe (which I also use
) is a great way to learn tunes from audio recordings.
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I suspect the reason I can't split hands is because I am using the wrong Notation product (Player instead of composer).
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Correct - our Player is just that, a player for MIDI, Karaoke (.kar) and our own NoteSoft (.not) files that will show you the notation "as is." It would take Notation Composer to work on a file like the "Donna Lee" that you've attached and get it into anything usable.
All that said, there are actually quite a few (lots of thousands) really good MIDI files out there on the internet (and free!) that you may find helpful for learning new songs in Composer or Musician. I've used a lot of such files myself for learning new songs, and they're typically done with a full complement of instruments which is fun, because I can mute the part I want to play and still have the other members of "the band" play along. I can speed them up or slow them down at will, too. Lots of fun
ttfn,
Sherry