23 Sep
2007
23 Sep
'07
11:11 a.m.
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
23 Sep
23 Sep
11:16 a.m.
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
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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.
Regards
Matthias
9:43 p.m.
Matthias Schönborn wrote:
On Sunday 23 September 2007 15:05:56 Simon Williams
wrote:
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(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
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(a)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. 
24 Sep
24 Sep
6:39 a.m.
On Monday 24 September 2007 00:43, david wrote:
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.
Sonic Visualiser (http://www.sonicvisualiser.org) is very suitable for this
sort of thing. It allows you to loop sections and slow them down, there are
plugins (see http://www.vamp-plugins.org/download.html -- the ones using Paul
Brossier's aubio library are obvious candidates) to help with pitch and key
estimation, and you can look at the frequency content in a spectrogram. It
won't do very meaningful audio-to-MIDI though.
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.
That's not a bad result for such a tough problem. Even monophonic note
tracking is tricky, depending a great deal on the instrument. Note tracking
in a dense polyphonic mixture is much harder (if it's possible at all).
Chris
7:44 p.m.
Oops -- meant to reply to all... sorry about the double post, Chris.
> 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?
I have a related question.
Suppose I wanted to get midi output from plain old guitar/audio input.
Obviously, this is entirely possible. A hardware midi controller or
soft synth would be necessary, right?
Don't want to spend cash on a hardware midi controller. Have noodled
around with ZynAddSubFx and have had no success so far; by "no
success," I mean I haven't even been able to input through jack
because my soundcard is apparently not midi-capable and therefore
won't even connect to Zyn. Anybody have any suggestions that don't
involve investments in hardware? Dumb as it sounds, I am very
confused about this -- I have seen audio input instantly converted to
midi in a "real" studio through a midi box. My understanding was that
soft synths should do the same thing. Is this wrong?
Thanks
11:31 p.m.
On 9/24/07, Charles Linart <clinart(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Oops -- meant to reply to all... sorry about the
double post, Chris.
Yes, this is wrong (kind of). MIDI is a digital control signal.
Audio is an analog voltage. No sound card is "MIDI capable" unless it
has MIDI ports (the 5-pin DIN connectors). The way to convert an
audio signal to MIDI is through software that listens to an audio
signal, figures out the pitch, and outputs corresponding MIDI data.
The aubio package contains a program called aubionotes that does just
that using jack, in real time (although it's far from perfect). There
are others programs that do this as well.
For example, I can send MIDI data to a softsynth using aubionotes by
connecting my alsa_capture input (that has my bass guitar plugged into
it) and connecting the program's ALSA midi output to the softsynth's
midi input. The softsynth will then play some notes that are somewhat
related to what I'm playing. Try it and you'll see what I mean.
Hope that helps
paul
> 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?
I have a related question.
Suppose I wanted to get midi output from plain old guitar/audio input.
Obviously, this is entirely possible. A hardware midi controller or
soft synth would be necessary, right?
Don't want to spend cash on a hardware midi controller. Have noodled
around with ZynAddSubFx and have had no success so far; by "no
success," I mean I haven't even been able to input through jack
because my soundcard is apparently not midi-capable and therefore
won't even connect to Zyn. Anybody have any suggestions that don't
involve investments in hardware? Dumb as it sounds, I am very
confused about this -- I have seen audio input instantly converted to
midi in a "real" studio through a midi box. My understanding was that
soft synths should do the same thing. Is this wrong?
25 Sep
25 Sep
7:24 a.m.
Chris Cannam wrote:
I knew it was a tricky problem before we began, but he really wanted to
find a solution to it, so we tried it. The one he eventually bought did
a good job of turning pitches into notes, but couldn't track melodies.
So each beat was a sheaf of tangled notes, with no way of telling which
note was supposed to be part of which melody. At least, without a lot of
intense listening while following the score - basically, the same amount
of effort and time it would have taken to transcribe by ear in the first
place ...
I had a roommate one summer who was in his fourth year at the Juliard
(sp?) Conservatory. I had him transcribe a tape for me, of a commercial
song with full string accompaniment. He got all the voices (solo and
backup singers), the ordinary instruments (guitars, piano, some other
solo instruments) and was happily transcribing *the full orchestral
arrangement* before he decided that I probably wasn't interested in
that! It took him less than two days of part time effort (he was working
full time work, plus the other normal parts of life like sleep). (He
also had perfect pitch - which quarter-inch audio cassettes do NOT have
- so he transcribed sustained notes complete with the tape's wow and
flutter ... )
An amazing talent. That is going completely unused as far as I know. He
graduated a couple of decades ago and works for a book publisher in San
Francisco, California ...
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community
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.
That's not a bad result for such a tough problem. Even monophonic note
tracking is tricky, depending a great deal on the instrument. Note tracking
in a dense polyphonic mixture is much harder (if it's possible at all). 
28 Sep
28 Sep
1:45 p.m.
Chris Cannam <cannam(a)all-day-breakfast.com> writes:
On Monday 24 September 2007 00:43, david wrote:
I've recently written a transcription system for polyphonic piano
music. It's based on the system described in "A Discriminative Model for
Polyphonic Piano Transcription" by Poliner and Ellis which uses support
vector machines for each piano note trained on spectral data to predict
sounding notes in small timeframes and hidden markov models to
temporally constrain those classification results. The results are
promising but not as good as I hoped (and sadly not as good as Poliner's
and Ellis'). I have a few ideas to improve the system but as I'm
currently searching for a job I have no time to implement those so I am
thinking about making my software open source (ATM it's a Python library
with command line tools).
If trained with other audio data than piano recordings it should also be
possible to transcribe other instruments but the restriction to one
instrument without slides, vibratos or anything like that remains.
Sebastian
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.
That's not a bad result for such a tough problem. Even monophonic note
tracking is tricky, depending a great deal on the instrument. Note tracking
in a dense polyphonic mixture is much harder (if it's possible at all). 
1 Oct
1 Oct
8:37 a.m.
Hi Sebastian and all,
On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 05:45:43PM +0200, Sebastian Gutsfeld wrote:
Chris Cannam <cannam(a)all-day-breakfast.com>
writes:
Sounds great! I'd be happy to plug it into the python side of the aubio
library, and very interested to know more about your implementation.
Let me know, Paul
On Monday 24 September 2007 00:43, david wrote:
I've recently written a transcription system for polyphonic piano
music. It's based on the system described in "A Discriminative Model for
Polyphonic Piano Transcription" by Poliner and Ellis which uses support
vector machines for each piano note trained on spectral data to predict
sounding notes in small timeframes and hidden markov models to
temporally constrain those classification results. The results are
promising but not as good as I hoped (and sadly not as good as Poliner's
and Ellis'). I have a few ideas to improve the system but as I'm
currently searching for a job I have no time to implement those so I am
thinking about making my software open source (ATM it's a Python library
with command line tools). 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.
That's not a bad result for such a tough problem. Even monophonic note
tracking is tricky, depending a great deal on the instrument. Note tracking
in a dense polyphonic mixture is much harder (if it's possible at all).
If trained with other audio data than piano recordings it should also be
possible to transcribe other instruments but the restriction to one
instrument without slides, vibratos or anything like that remains.
Sebastian
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26 Sep
26 Sep
9:14 p.m.
On Sunday 23 September 2007 23:16:35 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 had limited success with midingsolo if you limit yourself to a
recording of a single instruments playing single notes at a time.
It also works in realtime and can be great to add a pad type sound to the tail
of a note played by a realworld instrument.
For analysis of a file - sonic visualiser is the best tool I have found so
far.
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.
Regards
Matthias
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27 Sep
27 Sep
3:01 p.m.
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 09:14:10AM +1000, Danni Coy wrote:
On Sunday 23 September 2007 23:16:35 Matthias
Schönborn wrote:
Using aubionotes and jack, you should also be able to get a midi stream
as well, and plug it in your favorite sequencer/editor. The result
should be identical to that you obtained in Sonic Visualiser.
cheers, paul
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 had limited success with midingsolo if you limit yourself to a
recording of a single instruments playing single notes at a time.
It also works in realtime and can be great to add a pad type sound to the tail
of a note played by a realworld instrument.
For analysis of a file - sonic visualiser is the best tool I have found so
far. 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.
Regards
Matthias
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28 Sep
28 Sep
1:51 p.m.
heres a new one:
http://cosmal.ucsd.edu/arshia/index.php?n=Main.Transcribe
polyphonic, includes PD and Max externals..
On Sun Sep 23, 2007 at 02:05:56PM +0100, 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
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Linux-audio-user(a)lists.linuxaudio.org
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
1:53 p.m.
On Fri Sep 28, 2007 at 11:50:51AM -0400, cdr wrote:
heres a new one:
http://cosmal.ucsd.edu/arshia/index.php?n=Main.Transcribe
sorry about that. theres no source, and only binaries for Windows and Mac
polyphonic, includes PD and Max externals..
On Sun Sep 23, 2007 at 02:05:56PM +0100, 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(a)lists.linuxaudio.org
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
_______________________________________________
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2:49 p.m.
this one is for linux too, also named transcribe, proprietary...
http://www.seventhstring.com/
Edgar
heres a new
one:
http://cosmal.ucsd.edu/arshia/index.php?n=Main.Transcribe
sorry about that. theres no source, and only binaries for Windows and Mac
polyphonic, includes PD and Max externals..
On Sun Sep 23, 2007 at 02:05:56PM +0100, Simon Williams wrote:
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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
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http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/linux-audio-user
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13 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
-
cdr -
Charles Linart -
Chris Cannam -
Danni Coy -
david -
Edgar Aichinger -
Matthias Schönborn -
Paul Brossier -
Paul Coccoli -
Sebastian Gutsfeld -
Simon Williams