MuseScore midi to sheet music converter

• May 15, 2010 - 21:39

Greetings,
My name is Nir and I'm thinking of using musescore code to Convert midi to sheet music on my project.
I would like to know how "good" is the converter engine of musescore compared to other softwares like Sibelius and Finale. The accuracy of conversion to sheet music is really important for me. Are there any musicians that tested this software and compared it to other softwares(non free softwares also)? any information on this topic would be useful to me.

Thanks,
Nir


Comments

It depends of what you mean by good.
Midi does not contain all the information to make a sheet music. So all packages out there need to guess. Depending on the particular case, they guess more or less well.

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

Well,
I know that midi does not contain all the information to make a sheet music. But I know that there are plenty of companies that tried to develop components that does the best job that they can. What I'm interested is to find out what is the quality of using Musescore for such a purpose. Is musescore considered to be the best there is on market? if not, how good it is, compared to other softwares?

In reply to by nirmiklo

MuseScore's scores midi import is relative simple and does not compete with special programs designed for this purpose. It works well with synthesized music but is not very useful with real recordings of a musician.
Whats missing and may be targeted in a future version is tuplet recognition and automatic voice assignment. This requires some "artificial intelligence" and may be out of the scope of MuseScore.

In reply to by [DELETED] 3

Hi werner,
Could you describe more about the differences between synthesized music, and the "real recordings of a musician"?
I have an electronic piano keyboard, with Midi output. I would like to use Musescore API to convert the output Midi to MusicXML. As mentioned before, I'm looking for the most accurate conversion there is.

1. Under the assumption that I'm an avarage piano player, but the quality of conversion from midi to MusicXml is Important for me, is MuseScore "out of scope" for that purpose? or is it good enough, but of course not the best there is?

2. If not, do you know any other options that might be relevant for me? Is there any company, like finale or sibelius, that can offer me such a License?

Thanks

In reply to by nirmiklo

If you play from score you add interpretation to it. Even on a MIDI keyboard.
The MIDI file you can record should, if using the same soundfont play again and again what you heard the first time (you would not be able to do that!)
Transferring your MIDI recorded file to some music editor should use 1/64th note to be the more similar to your initial interpretation, but it would just be an approximation. And of course the socre you could edit would just be unusable....

just try it!

In reply to by nirmiklo

If you play a quarter note on your piano you will not press the key for the exact duration of 1/4 but usually less. MuseScore cannot distinguish between a staccato played 1/4 note and say a 1/8 note followed by a 1/8 rest. If you do not press the key exactly on beat and for an arbitrary duration this can easily be notated most accurate with a lot of small rests and tied notes. But the resulting score will not be readable and mostly useless.
A high quality conversion tries to _interpret_ the input by quantizing note positions and length and by guessing higher level constructs like tuplets or voices. This makes the score more readable but is certainly not accurate.

Midi produced with a sequencer is easier to interpret because notes are usually on beat and more regular.

In reply to by trig-ger

Good grief, that's an old comparison chart! Hard to believe it's still online. Many of the products have been discontinued, a couple for nearly a decade. Still, it was amusing to see how many I have bought over the years, mostly the Mac versions.

Speaking of Mac, there were many others not on that list. Sheesh! Well, thanks for the trip down memory lane aka notation hell.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.