[LAU] Audio to midi, finding notes from an mp3

david gnome at hawaii.rr.com
Sun Sep 23 19:43:21 EDT 2007


Matthias Schönborn wrote:
> On Sunday 23 September 2007 15:05:56 Simon Williams wrote:
>> Does anyone know of a program which will convert audio to midi?
>> Maybe that's a little ambitious. What about something that will show
>> which notes are being played or what key the audio is in?
>>
>> I have some mp3s which I want to play along to, but I have no idea what
>> key they are in or what notes are being played. The tracks move too
>> quickly for me to pick out the notes.
>>
>> If all else fails, I need some way of sanely repeating a short section
>> of music so that I can try and find the notes myself.
>>
>> Any ideas?
>> Thanks
>> Simon
>> _______________________________________________
>> Linux-audio-user mailing list
>> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
>> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
> 
> Hi Simon,
> 
> I don't know if there is a program that will show which notes are played, but 
> to repeat a short section and play it as slow as you like you can import the 
> file to ardour. There you can define such sections, and if I remember it 
> right, you can play the song at any speed.

There are a lot of programs that can turn audio recordings into MIDI 
files. They all seem to be closed-source, proprietary, pay-money Windows 
programs. My band leader and I tried out some of them (they can run 
under WINE, typically, and my band leader uses Windows, anyway).

Not a single one produced anything usable! They were able to identify 
notes, and output them as MIDIs, but the output was pretty useless: 
every note of every instrument on the same staff. I suppose you could 
preprocess the audio - for instance, filter out everything except bass 
frequencies and then get a bass MIDI. But the middle and higher ranges 
where multiple instruments hang out wouldn't respond well to that 
approach. Vocal melodies usually threw them completely.

We both concluded it was better to do it the old fashioned way - 
transcription by ear.

I presume you could play it through Ardour, and play a keyboard into a 
sequencer on the same computer to record it ...

-- 
David
gnome at hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community



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