Opening old "MIDI-XML"s leads to fatal "Bad Format" errors

• Jan 1, 2024 - 18:44

Hello,

Trying to open old xml files from Hamienet.com results in "bad format" errors. Opening the files shows a different file structure from what I'd be expecting as well, so hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me can tell me how to open these in a readable way. Just importing the MIDI gets the notes, but is a trainwreck of rests and triplets.

Attachment	Size
16874.xml	446.32 KB
16874_To-Keep-My-Love-Alive.mid	17.98 KB

Comments

Jojo-Schmitz

• Jan 1, 2024 - 19:08

As far as I can tell that isn't really MusicXML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE MIDIFile PUBLIC
  "-//Recordare//DTD MusicXML 0.9 MIDI//EN"
  "http://www.musicxml.org/dtds/midixml.dtd">
<MIDIFile>
...
</MIDIFile>

Well, it is, sort of, but version 0.9, so some time before it got standardized, MusicXML 1.0 stems from January 2004

molst030

• Jan 1, 2024 - 21:50

Is there any way to get it to be read by Musescore in any way that will be legible to humans without completely rewriting it?

bobjp

• Jan 1, 2024 - 23:56

I think the problem is going to be how the midi was created. It was probably created by someone playing a keyboard. (Or someone with a DAW. They try to "humanize" music, and aren't always concerned with notation.) I which case the midi file will reflect as close as possible what the person played. That's midi's job. MU4 would have to spend all its time guessing what the music would look like in notation. And no doubt be wrong. So why can't the program just round off to the nearest beat or something? How would it know which way to go?

Jojo-Schmitz

• Jan 2, 2024 - 00:25