 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: clarinetgiggirl
Date: 2003-01-25 08:39
I am a big fan of 'Slow Gold' using it to slow down my favourite solos to help me to learn them by ear (I am still a beginner and can't pick out many tunes at their normal tempo).
Does anyone know of a similar programme which also allows you to change the key of the recording? This would help when I want to learn tunes in the keys my friends play in, where the only recordings I have are in a different key.
Thanks in advance.
Clarinetgiggirl
(a rather optimistic description)
PS I am based in the UK.
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Author: Clarence
Date: 2003-01-25 13:15
<http:www.notation.com> I have used this program to convert MIDI music to sheet and to playback the music at slower speeds. It will also do limited conversion between keys. I have converted between Bb and Eb clarinet.
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Author: ALOMARvelous12
Date: 2003-01-25 13:17
MIDI Notate lets you change keys and gives you the option to display transposed instruments in concert or instrument pitch. It also lets you do stuff like slow down tempo, extracting parts, and you can mute tracks. (so you can do stuff like with those music minus one titles where you can here the entire ensemble and then mute your instrument and play along)
I've never heard of Slow Gold, but it doesn't sound like it's any better than MIDI Notate. Try it out at http://www.notation.com
BTW, when you say "recording", you mean MIDI files, right? Because I don't think there's any program in the world that lets you convert mp3 or wav into sheetmusic.
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Author: Jerry
Date: 2003-01-25 13:25
Two I am aware of...
Amazing Slowdowner ($40). Allows direct slowdown and/or pitch change direct from the CD drive. It is easy to use. But the pitch change is not in fixed half-tone increments as it is in...
Cool Edit ($70). Allows fixed half tone pitch changes, but, as far as I can tell, slowed-down music needs to be recorded from the CD onto your computer first. Speed/pitch changes constitute about 5% of what this program does.
Tell me about "Slow Gold". How much does it cost? How does it work? Why are you still looking for options?
I have a question. Are you aware of any inexpensive programs that transcribe MIDI, or, especially, WAVE or MP3 sound files to printed sheet music? It would be great to get the lead melody lines transcribed to sheet music. In complex pieces, this would be difficult. But it should be feasible for solos or other pronounced single instrument parts of songs, e.g. clarinet solo parts of Rhapsodie Espagnol.
Jerry
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Author: Jerry
Date: 2003-01-25 13:40
Clarence...
Is it possible to convert MP3 or WAVE files to MIDI files? If so, does it have any useable result? If it did, then software could (theoretically) transcribe it. This stuff is more beyond me then even the clarinet!
Jerry
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Author: ALOMARvelous12
Date: 2003-01-25 13:44
Yes, I think there are several programs (go do a check on CNet) that can turn WAV into MIDI. But I guarentee you that the MIDI results are NOT good and come nowhere close to just hand sequenced MIDI.
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Author: Clarence
Date: 2003-01-25 13:49
Jerry,
The software that I mentioned will only work with MIDI files. I don't know of any software that will convert WAV or MP3 to MIDI. You can print to the printer or save to the harddrive in a non-standard format.
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2003-01-25 14:25
You can't really turn wav to MIDI ... wav is a "sound" file (it has the bits that encode an acoustical wave), a MIDI is an "instrumentation/note" file (more like a score - this instrument plays these notes).
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Author: Jack Kissinger
Date: 2003-01-25 14:59
Since you're using SlowGold, I assume you are working with CD's rather than midi files. According to the SlowGold website, SlowGold includes pitch shifting in its feature set. That's the feature you want to change the key. If you have a user's manual, you might find instructions there -- or try the software's help button. It probably doesn't allow you to specify that you want to change from, e.g., Bb to C. (While it might be feasible, I doubt the software can recognize what key a piece is in on a CD.) More likely it either allows you to shift the pitch by a percentage or perhaps by increments of a full or semi-tone, so you may have to experiment to get a piece where you want it.
A decent music notation software program (Finale, Sibelius, Encore, Music Time) and probably many of the shareware/freeware programs on the web will allow you to change both pitch and tempo on midi files. AFAIK, however, technology hasn't reached the point where there is a program that can analyze a CD, wav or mp3 file into individual instrument lines. Until that happens there won't be software that can create useable midi files from any of these formats. ALOMARvelos12, if you know of such a program, please let us know what it is.
CoolEdit is, IMHO, a remarkable program. CoolEdit Pro is off the charts. It can do time and/or pitch shifting but only on files that have been recorded on the computer. It has many other uses. For example, you can use it to create CD's from LP's, editing out clicks and pops in the process. You can also use it to capture audio from the web. (It can capture in CD-quality digital form any sound that goes through your sound card.) Have a tape or CD of that solo you played with orchestra or band? Did you squawk or hit a wrong note or two. With patience, you can fix it. Or record a piece under tempo and then make yourself sound like you have Charles Neidich fingers or Robert Spring tongue. ;^) The capabilities of digital editing are scarey indeed! Free downloads of CoolEdit and CoolEdit Pro are available (30-day time limit) at the company's website.
Best regards,
jnk
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Author: ALOMARvelous12
Date: 2003-01-25 15:12
Take a look at these two programs, which supposedly convert sound to midi.
http://www.pluto.dti.ne.jp/~araki/amazingmidi/
http://www.intelliscore.net/
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2003-01-25 16:05
If you read carefully you'll notice it says "converts polyphonic single instrument to MIDI" - which, translatred, says if you try anything that has more than one instrument playing at a time it outputs junk. Even a soft rhythm section causes these programs to go somewhere out in la-la land.
Neither programs are ready for prime-time IMNSHO (and I've tried both and one or two more).
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Author: Eddie
Date: 2003-01-25 16:50
Wav sound->Midi/notation is a very difficult problem. Even midi-> notation is fairly hard. The difficulties are:
1) Time quantization: How does the program sync onto the tempo? Once it does that, it has to have some fudge room for shifting, and deliberate changes in tempo and/or meter are going to be very hard to follow (more a problem for notation than midi-midi only cares about how long the notes are, not their location in terms of beats). Also there is no way for a program to know the difference between say a stacatto quarter note and a written 8th note/rest (again mostly a problem for notation.)
2) Finding the pitch: Assume only one note is playing. You have the fundamental and a bunch of overtones. Some heuristic will be necessary to determine the fundamental (just picking the lowest frequency with power in it is problematic). This is tricky, but possible obviously since tuners do it all the time. It does take a bit of time to lock on to the fundamental, generally the lower the note, the longer the time it takes to get enough information to lock on. If multiple notes are sounded, then their overtones are all tangled up, and determining which of them are fundamentals is really, really hard.
Generally the way pitch recognition is done is an FFT is done on an input sample. I'll leave out some details but basically it often isn't good enough to resolve notes that are close together in time or pitch.
If the recording has major pitch problems (like someone whistling or singing without a reference pitch) they'll probably drift so far out of tune that the generated midi will, at some point, bump up a half step higher or lower than it should.
I got to rambling there, but thats what I've found when working on the problem. You can get decent sound->midi for monophonic, slow music, anything else gets hard in a hurry.
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Author: Jim E.
Date: 2003-01-26 05:08
Cakewalk does a decent job of converting midi to notation, and allows great flexibility in changing keys, editing parts and changing tempos, but it is not cheap.
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Author: clarinetgiggirl
Date: 2003-01-27 12:18
Its actually from CD rather than Midi file I am interested in (actually, I am not quite sure what a Midi file is!).
It is also Slow Blast rather than Slow Gold that I have - I think I may have bought the wrong programme - but looks like if I upgrade to Slow Gold, I will get all that I need.
Thank you for the great advice.
I don't post many questions, but I read the Phorum most days and regularly use the search facility.
Cheers!
CGG
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Author: Mark Sloss
Date: 2003-01-27 13:00
Superscope makes a couple portable CD players that are intended as practice tools (one even records). It allows pitch-shifting, looping, and a lot of other cool features. Expensive solution, but very simple to use.
If you want to do it on computer, any number of inexpensive audio programs have basic pitch shifting (like CoolEdit), and you can get plugins now that do pitch shifting with formant processing so you don't get the Lurch or Chipmunks effect.
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