Am Dienstag 10 März 2009 schrieb Nathanael Anderson: About ten years ago (on Atari/MiNT) I wrote a C program similar to this, but for baroque lute tabulature... I wanted it to help me transform any midifile I was interested in, be it classical orchestral or chamber works, piano works or pieces for classical guitar, in a semi-automatic way, to Wayne Cripp's lutetab code, and it worked out surprisingly good, given that I was a lousy DIY hacker ;) (I don't really code anymore). I didn't care much about 2) and 3) but for 1) I came up with an algorithm like this: - determine the string on which the pitch can be played at the lowest fret possible - check if this string is used already, and if yes move this note to the next (lower) string For notes lower than the instrument range (13 course lute goes down to A, a 5th lower than guitar) I chose to just place a comment in the tab output, so that I would be able to decide afterwards what to do with that note (transpose up an octave, skip it, whatever). Since it's been a long time now I can't remember how I dealt with files containing more than one track, but I somehow managed to merge them into a single tabulature, I have for example produced nice tabulatures of the accompaniment of the first three movements of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater. For these of course I had to prepare the midifiles, remove the voice tracks and transpose to a key suitable to the lute. Other problems I've encountered and I'm not sure if or how I solved them: - the bar/beat counting got screwed up sometimes, especially with grace notes - of course, I had to remove double notes when boiling down ensemble works - there are different lute tunings, I only dealt with standard baroque d-minor tuning - on the lute, the diatonic basses (lower than the 6th course) are tuned to the key of the piece The thing is based on the ancient midifile(3) lib by Tim Thompson et al. which is a little gem IMHO. The library parses the midifile, all you have to do is to write a few callback functions for the events you're interested in. Some example code is in the archive, and it took me just a few days to come up with something useful. I never seriously thought about releasing it, even after I compared it's output's quality to what Django can do (an impressive M$ tabulature editor, mainly for historic fretted instruments, the demo from http://musickshandmade.com/lute/pages/django runs quite well in wine) and found that I was doing pretty well. :) I'm sure there are stupid things in there and it's not at all in a releasable state, but if you are interested I'll share the code... Edgar