Audio To MIDI Conversion

[tpreitzel]

Chris -

The developers of Audacity have been kicking around this idea. Personally, I'd love to see it. As the developer of Rosegarden, you've probably given this idea some thought. I was looking at some free audio to MIDI converters, specifically WaoN http://waon.sourceforge.net/index.html , which reminded me superficially of Sonic Visualiser. Have you considered adding audio to MIDI conversion within Sonic Visualiser? Before trying Sonic Visualiser , I wanted your opinion. Personally, I'm really looking for audio to MIDI conversion of musical data. Regardless, I want to take this moment to thank you for all the years of work on Rosegarden, especially the QT4 port which must be consuming lots of your time.

[cannam]

Well, it's already possible to do audio-to-MIDI in Sonic Visualiser: just use a Vamp plugin.

There are currently two plugins that can be used for this -- the Aubio Notes plugin, and the Transcription plugin in the QM plugin set.  They're very dependent on the source material, but they can work well for some types of music (this is one reason I wouldn't really want to try to build this sort of function in to the host).  Run one of these plugins in Sonic Visualiser and you should get a new Note layer as output, which you can then export as MIDI.

This would also be a very obvious way to do audio-to-MIDI in Audacity; you can already run these plugins there, it's just that the program lacks (so far) the ability to present the result data as a note track.  Any developer seriously considering writing new audio-to-MIDI code would be very well advised to at least consider doing so as a Vamp plugin.


Chris