Wav to midi and vica versa

[banjosaurus]

What is the best program for wav to midi to wav conversion?
Anyone familiar with or recommending a particular software package(s)

[pmalcolm]

wav to midi is as good as impossible! Despite what many programs out there claim to do, they can't! You CAN convert a single note wav melody into a midi file but as soon as more than one note or more than one instrument is involved it just can't be done.

[midimart]

Hi Banjo....

Paul is right...... NONE of them work.

Save your dosh - Leave well alone.

[jford]

As many have said, WAV (and/or MP3) and MIDI files are two completely different things. The WAV file is a finished product, possibly produced by MIDI or live playing. MIDI is strictly commands to the MIDI rendering engine as to how to produce the sound.

It's like taking a nicely frosted cake and trying to take is apart and put everything back to original ingredients (dry flour, unbroken eggs, a nicely written recipe, etc).

While there have been strides in this area over the years, it's got a long way to go.

That being said, the new PowerTracks version 12 from PGMusic (the same company that sells Band-In-A-Box) has a new improved Audio Chord Wizard, that does a pretty decent job of figuring out a chord progression to an audio (WAV/MP3) file. That can help greatly with transcribing songs. At least you get the bass note and the chords. You would have to fill in the rest.

[midimart]

Banjo - The Vica Versa method is possible, I do it all the time....

There are 100's of Midi to wav/mp3 converters out there and the majority are very good.

The one I use is MidConverter and can be found here Midi Converter

[Stephanie]

Neuratron, the folks who make PhotoScore (an OCR program for sheet music), also have a product called AudioScore which will do some midi capture from a WAV or your microphone. I haven't tried it, but it might be worth a look. Speaking of PhotoScore, the new version claims to read handwritten scores. Neat trick if it works. Unfortunately the downloadable demo is for PhotoScore MIDI, a lite version which doesn't have this capability. Anyway, they're at www.neuratron.com if anyone's interested.

[JazzCat]

The way Audio to MIDI converters work is by listening to frequencies and then converting those frequencies to what the program things is the corresponding MIDI note.

These programs hear harmonic overtones and falsely add MIDI notes to your file. ( known as artifacts)

Audio to MIDI works best with a single instruments that does not have a lot of harmonic overtones.

Even then you still have to do quite a bit of editing.

Believe it or not though, I have done one MIDI file with the use of a wave to MIDI converter. I spent weeks editing the original mess that came out of the program.

See, what you get is one channel of data. ALL of the notes that the program hears goes into ONE track/channel Its then your job to figure out what is the bass, and move those notes individually to another track, decide what is guitar and move those notes, etc etc.
You also have to decide what is an artifact and what is a legitimate note.

Consider a vocalist being on the audio file you are converting. A decent vocalist is going to be using their vibrato, right? Well, a bending of pitch converts as separate notation. So now you have 30 to 40 small, useless notes to delete.

Often quiet notes within a passage will transcribe as multiple notes because the program doesn't know whether to use that frequency or not use it. More notation to delete.
Also quite often the programs will completely miss notation that you will have to add in later yourself.

Now don't you think it's just easier to sequence something from scratch than to mess with this?

[shyamwestwind]

The faster everyone tealizes the futility, the better - have tried and tried and eventually decided it was better to sequence it my way. I love using an accompaniment, play around with it a bit and do a good song remix to get a fresh punchy sound. Good fun .

[pdiroma]

I agree with JazzCat, I have tried many of the converter programs and it would take too much time to convert. Also, if there is a singer with vibrato, it can be maddening with all the extra notes.