MIDI Converting Software, Suggestions?

[Aaron_Black]

Hi all,

Looking for a MP3/WAV to MIDI converter (for free, obviously), anyone got any ideas or suggestions? There must be a decent freeware one out there....

Aaron

[Creaphis]

There isn't even a decent commercial one out there. A MIDI file consists of timing information - essentially, it's a list of what notes to play at what times with what instruments. There is no way to pull information of this sort out of a raw sound file.

[Patrick]

Actually, iTunes can convert Midis into AAC or MP3. I know this because when I had an ipod, I had doom music on it :P

Be warned that it may not sound at all like what you expect, however.

[DuckReconMajor]

Patrick said:

Actually, iTunes can convert Midis into AAC or MP3. I know this because when I had an ipod, I had doom music on it :P

Be warned that it may not sound at all like what you expect, however.

The opposite is quite easy. However, no one's figured out how to do a decent job with raw sound -> midi yet.

I tried a freeware one that was supposed to be decent, and tried to convert a song from the original Super Mario Land (for the original Game Boy) but it couldn't even handle that. What was annoying was that it did some parts quite well, but left notes out in others.

[deathbringer]

Short answer: mp3 etc to Midi converters don't exist

Long answer: Actually they do, but they're shit. Also this answer was shorter than the short answer so i'll extend it with a pointless sentence.

[Aaron_Black]

deathbringer said:

Short answer: mp3 etc to Midi converters don't exist

Long answer: Actually they do, but they're shit. Also this answer was shorter than the short answer so i'll extend it with a pointless sentence.

LOL

Well, thanks for the advice. To make music for doom of an already recorded song, is it an idea to actually program it into a midi creator from scratch??

[DuckReconMajor]

Aaron_Black said:

Well, thanks for the advice. To make music for doom of an already recorded song, is it an idea to actually program it into a midi creator from scratch??

Sure

What you could also do is to get a free mp3 to midi program, and use what is makes as a base and fix it up.

[GreyGhost]

Aaron_Black said:

To make music for doom of an already recorded song, is it an idea to actually program it into a midi creator from scratch??

Best suggestion I can offer is to find the sheet music and transcribe it to midi, the few MP3/midi converters that exist are little more than a bad joke - like trying to reconstruct a cow after it's been butchered, cooked and eaten.

[Gez]

"Normal" sound formats, wav, mp3 and others, record sound directly. Midi is a music sheet: it says which instruments are playing which notes.

As a result, different sound cards will play the same midi file in different ways. Also has a result, converting a sound file to a midi file requires analyzing the sound to identify which instruments are being played, and what note they're playing. This, of course, is a complicated and error-prone process.

[RestlessRodent]

Well, I used a program that turned the Picard Song into tons of keys on the piano. So it sounded like somebody banged on tons of keys on the keyboard. Some parts made me laugh, hearing Picard's voice playing from a bunch of keys.

[Aliotroph?]

I once had a demo of one of those that worked really well as long as you didn't have any percussion happening. Those programs don't have a clue about percussion. They also won't be able to separate instruments into channels to make it easier to build a nice MIDI file. Converting something into a decent example would still be long and tedious for anything more complex than piano music.


If you have a specific song in mind it might be better to start by searching for a MIDI file somebody else made. A good place to start would be musicrobot.com.