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Post by Tubbs on Feb 28, 2008 17:52:29 GMT
Hi John, can you explain to me the concept of mp3 to midi software and just a quick rundown on how they work? Are they any good? etc. When it has converted to midi, can you then use a sequencer to change patches? Excuse my ignorance mate, but i really am clueless to the workings of it and at the same time intrigued as it sounds like a handy tool. Thanks, Gerry!!
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Post by Emerald Midi on Feb 28, 2008 20:22:13 GMT
John or Jazzcat will undoubtedly give you a more definitive response but my experience is that converting MP3 to Midi simply does not work! I hear all sorts of stories about certain products only to find they do not produce anything close to what we'd recognise as music. It's a shame as having something that would works would make my life a lot easier
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Post by Tubbs on Feb 28, 2008 20:34:53 GMT
You're probably right Pat, its just someone told me about "Widi", a software programme that is "allegedly" fairly good. Maybe John or Jazzcat can shed some light on it.
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Post by thingyy on Feb 28, 2008 21:25:29 GMT
It's as good as trying to make a kilo of mince into a cow.
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Post by Tubbs on Feb 29, 2008 10:17:53 GMT
It's as good as trying to make a kilo of mince into a cow. Ha ha, well that about sums it up thingy!! ;D
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Post by Emerald Midi on Feb 29, 2008 10:37:03 GMT
It's a terrible shame such a device, one that actually worked, doesn't exist. Imagine the benefits: just line up any song you have in your album collection, click a few buttons and - hey presto! - you know have a decent Midi version also. I'd sure love something like that
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JazzCat
Full Member
E=Fb Musician's Theory of Relativity
Posts: 709
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Post by JazzCat on Mar 1, 2008 11:44:54 GMT
Here is an e-mail I send out every time someone asks about wave or MP3 to MIDI: As one who has first hand experience in Wave to MIDI conversion I can tell you, it's not something you want to pursue. I have attempted to do two wave to MIDI files. One I started over 2 years ago and it still isn't complete. On the other file the only useful part was some of the bass. Most people just assume that you throw a wave or an MP3 file in and a beautiful MIDI file pops out. That doesn't happen at all. It is a painstaking and very slow process. First off, Wave to MIDI programs only 'hear' frequencies. The technology does not exist for them to be able to tell one instrument from another, and so what you get is one track of every frequency it 'hears' played as one instrument. Piano, for example. Every 'note' it 'hears' is picked up. (Well, some notes aren't) And, some frequencies your ears don't notice or 'hear' are picked up and played as notes. For instance, the harmonic overtones of guitar strings. These 'artifacts' of sound are picked up and played as 'notes'. Some of them are screamingly loud too, which I haven't been able to understand why. Also, not everything your ears hear is picked up either. Lots of the music will be missing. Soft notes sometimes are not heard at all, or they will often blip in and out creating multiple notes like a machine gun. There can be multiple thousands of them in a file and they have to be deleted one by one, then the first note you wanted has to be lengthened by hand. Drums are also going to be picked up, not by instrument sound but by frequency. That means they will become 'musical notation'. Vibrato or modulation is picked up as separate notes as well. Every waver in pitch is a frequency change so every one is picked up as separate notation. Imagine the mess! Oh and let's not forget pitch bends or portamento. It doesn't 'hear' them any better than vibrato. The program I have, (WidiSoft) allows you to separate the tracks only by loudness or softness, which does you no good at all. You wind up putting it all back on one track and sorting through the entire mess, note by note. BTW, WidiSoft is one of the better programs. Another thing. Not only do you have to sift through the notes but you also have to put them in time. You have to have some way of getting an exact tempo on the wave file in order to tell the conversion software what tempo the audio file is to attempt to get the music in time ((Bars, Beats, Tics) in your MIDI sequencing program. And even at that, if the audio file is of live players, with no drum machine, the tempo is not going to stay constant and the music will be off the grid. Wave to MIDI in my opinion is only good for is single instrument work that is crystal clear. A solo piano performance or an acoustic guitar. Even then there is a good deal of editing involved. For any full band or orchestrated piece it's much faster and MUCH easier to sequence it yourself. Cat >^..^< Jefferson <(©¿©)> My site: members.tripod.com/CatJefferson/place.htmPhotos: community.webshots.com/user/jazzcat_singsMySpace: www.myspace.com/the_jazzcatMy volunteer work: www.MonsterManor.org
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Post by Tubbs on Mar 1, 2008 13:07:53 GMT
Thanks for the lowdown jazzcat, and there is me with some grand illusion that you press the convert switch and "hey presto"!! Oh, and great links to your sites by the way, i see you were in Giza at the pyramids, i have been there twice myself as i have a big interest in egyptology, both times coming back from Cairo it took at least a week to get the smell of the spices out of my nose from the nightly markets, a truly amazing place though!! Thanks!!
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Post by JohnG on Mar 1, 2008 15:41:51 GMT
Sorry for the delay in getting back on this one.
Well JazzCat has supplied a fair amount of info already and all she says is perfectly correct.
The only things I'd add, so you can visualise it, is try taking a look at a tune as a waveform, a wav not an mp3, in a free program like Audacity. Take any song from a CD of pop, rock, jazz whatever you like.
What do you see? Do you see the instruments separated up, so we can see bass and guitar and drums and sax and vocals and so on? No, all we see is a waveform, a squiggly line. A mix of all those things that are going on there at the same time. And as JazzCat said there's vibrato, tremolo and all sorts of other things going on there too. Don't forget too the pitch bending that a guitarist often does.
If it's a recording of acoustic instruments they won't all be in perfect tune either. And all the waves that each instrument produces get mixed together into one wave. Well 2 actually, left and right for stereo.
Now I've got to try to write a program that analyses that wave and extracts, into separate midi tracks, the instruments that are represented by that wave. With note ons, note offs, pitchbend, chords etc. Can you give me any clues as to where to begin? Cos it sure as heck beats me. As was said, most elegantly by thingyy, it's like trying to convert mincemeat back into cows. But this mincemeat doesn't just come from one cow it's taken from half a dozen. Oh yes and the drum set probably consists of ten separate instruments on its own!
How does our brain separate them,? Well it's very good at recognising transients, the start up shape of notes.
Try imagining doing the conversion yourself. Listen to a few seconds of music, tell the members of the band what notes and chords, which drums , cymbals etc. to play. Then listen a bit more and tell them again and so on. Oh, and write it all down at the same time too. Don't forget vibrato, tremolo, pitch bend, tuning, playing just before or after the beat, expression, oh and a ton of other things. Not an easy task, I certainly couldn't do it. Just play me a few chords on a piano and I'm lost.
But, as JazzCat said again, take a single voice, singing in tune please, maybe listening to a metronome in earphones, (we don't want the tick recorded) the timing provided by a voice to score utility, and we may be able to lay down a single track with some accuracy.
But now you want an mp3 file converted! Well an mp3 file is a compressed version of the original wav using an algorithm that throws away data (sounds) that it believes are at too low a level to be heard! So in fact it's a distorted version of what we couldn't decipher in the first place. It's been through the mincer twice! Converting it back to a wav file doesn't restore any thing that was thrown away in the first place.
In fact I wonder that programs like Widi can make anything of what remains!
Hope that helps, Best regards, JohnG.
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Post by Tubbs on Mar 1, 2008 16:18:56 GMT
Thanks for the reply john, it certainly makes a bit more sense now and i bow to your superior knowledge!! When i read the information regards one of these programs it made it sound a little too easy, literally press convert and let the program do the rest, so thanks again for explaining it fully (and to jazzcat), on this occasion i don't think i'll be investing in one!! Much appreciated!!
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Post by Emerald Midi on Mar 1, 2008 18:24:14 GMT
I have moved this question to here as the Midi Basics. by johng11 section was set up specifically so JohnG could publish his Midi related articles in there and then for others to respond to them if they wished. This area Technical Questions is, as the name implies, for technical question Thanks all for your understanding.
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Post by JohnG on Mar 2, 2008 14:11:34 GMT
Hi Tubbs, Oh, and just to add one final word to what I already wrote, don't forget that the whole thing is usually awash with reverb that adds all sorts of reflections at different times to the whole mess of minced meat, sorry, waveform! For those of you searching for the final word it was "reverb". Have fun, JohnG.
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