Import of MIDI Files

• Jun 22, 2012 - 07:37

hello to all,

I am a jazz piano player and definitely unexperienced using transcription software.
after some investgations I bought a license of the WIDI Recognision SW, which
provides good results when transcribing piano standards without any drums, bass etc.

But when I import the exported MIDI file into musescore the result is really poor.
The scale, number of notes etc, which have been displayed in the WIDI system,
are not the same after import in MuseScore.

Whats the problem?

thx for help in advance

randy

Comments

ChurchOrganist

• Jun 22, 2012 - 08:18

I see from their website that WIDI is audio to MIDI recognition software.

This can be regarded as the Holy Grail of the music industry, and the development of it is still in its infancy. The fact that it will now turn a piano solo into acceptable MIDI performance data is a major step forward, as previously all this kind of software could do reliably was turn monophonic sound sources into MIDI data.

The only problem you have now is that raw MIDI performance data and notation are two completely different entities. The MIDI data will contain nuances of performance which just aren't capable of being turned into readable music notation.

MuseScore's MIDI conversion is still a work in progress, which means that any MIDI data you pass to it requires prior processing before it can be turned into an acceptable score.

This is done by what is known as quantisation. This means that the notes in the MIDI data are rounded up and down to produce data acceptable to a score editor.

For this you need MIDI sequencing software. There are a number of freeware and Open source solutions for this on the Linux platform, but sadly, only a very few for Windows. There are several proprietary Windows solutions such as Cubase and Sonar however.

A list of these can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MIDI_editors_and_sequencers

HTH
Michael