Does audio to midi work for anyone?

[sowhoso]

here's an example of what i want audio to midi for. please download it convert it and post your results any way you wish. please describe your process. thx!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36010676/forum% ... NO-019.mp3

[Willyum]

I found it more frustrating than useful when I beta tested it... and yes, thats including un-warped and transient placement. It was just really hit or miss for me. You do get better results the more you tweak the clip, but even that breaks the workflow so much it becomes a burden... When/If Abes get it closer to the melodyne level of accuracy, I'll be impressed with it.

[melocoton]

I had a quick go, got best results with harmony, but had to delete the highest notes as they were wrong.

Yeah, I got the same thing. That was weird, it's like it picked out some harmonics in the guitar sound that were barely audible and decided they were notes. overall I'm surprised how well harmony mode works. it almost seems to work better than melody. I think it definitely has a lot of creative misuse/abuse potential. I was having fun taking a complex multitrack mix with guitars and bass, running it through harmony, putting a simple synth sound on it and running it to a reverb at 100% wet and mixing it with the original audio track. it gives it a weird reverb sound that lines up perfectly with the original source but is actually coming from a different instrument.

[CarlSeleborg]

Hi melocoton,

Indeed, the Audio-to-MIDI features take a little bit of practice. We have a video tutorial with a few tips and tricks, I hope this helps:

https://www.ableton.com/en/articles/aud ... nd-tricks/


Best,

Carl

[CarlSeleborg]

Funken, nice little tutorial!

Carl

[sowhoso]

Hi melocoton,

Indeed, the Audio-to-MIDI features take a little bit of practice. We have a video tutorial with a few tips and tricks, I hope this helps:

https://www.ableton.com/en/articles/aud ... nd-tricks/


Best,

Carl

hey Carl, please scroll up and download the file i posted. it would be great to see and learn from your results

[doghouse]

I also have Melodyne and my first attempts at Live pitch2midi show it to be inferior. However, I'm going to keep working with it, I'm sure I can tame it a bit and having it inside Live makes it faster to get parts from singing to MIDI.

[sowhoso]

here's an example of what i want audio to midi for. please download it convert it and post your results any way you wish. please describe your process. thx!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36010676/forum% ... NO-019.mp3

well i've spent a long time trying to make the file above convert. not even a decent result. i thought slow arpeggios on guitar would be pretty straight forward.

i'm VERY DISAPPOINTED with Live's audio to midi

i was so looking forward to this feature

[ian_halsall]

it works well on some stuff and not on others.

I think it's better than nothing but I think it probably needs a few parameters which the user can edit to try and get better results.

I found that even where it made a total mess of it I could still pick the notes of the melody out of it - not perfect - but how can something like this ever get it bang on every time?

[sowhoso]

bang on?

i was hoping for just a decent result, delete a few notes here and there. it was such a mess that it was too time consuming to make it worthwhile. notes were even missing where it was pretty clear and had a marker. this from simple guitar arpeggios

it's bang off

[CarlSeleborg]

Hi sowhoso,

I take it this is a recording of yourself playing the guitar, right? The results are indeed not easy to work with. When I listen to the audio, it strikes me that your guitar has a very "ringing" sound - you can hear all of the strings all the time, which creates a complex spectrum that's hard to analyze. I would try to record again but placing the microphone farther away, so that you catch the attacks but without capturing all the complex interference between the strings, see if that helps. Does that make sense?

Carl

[sowhoso]

Hi sowhoso,

I take it this is a recording of yourself playing the guitar, right? The results are indeed not easy to work with. When I listen to the audio, it strikes me that your guitar has a very "ringing" sound - you can hear all of the strings all the time, which creates a complex spectrum that's hard to analyze. I would try to record again but placing the microphone farther away, so that you catch the attacks but without capturing all the complex interference between the strings, see if that helps. Does that make sense?

Carl

thx Carl. i tried again using a classical guitar (rings less) and the mic 4 feet away. there were fewer added high notes, but the results were still very messy

it's easy enough deleting the added high notes. the problem is wrong notes in the correct octave, missing notes and added notes which are really just previously sustaining notes

too much cleaning required and that after adding markers to every note

here's the new file:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/36010676/forum% ... NO-029.mp3

[CarlSeleborg]

OK, the second recording was better. The results still needed some work, so here's what I did:

- Converted Melody to new MIDI track
- Panned audio hard left and MIDI hard right (makes it easier to hear missing notes)
- Wherever a note was missing, I went to audio clip and either added a transient or moved an existing one a few ms to the left (so that it dips into a more stable part of the note)
- Converted again
- Cleaned up the new MIDI, and transposed a few notes that were wrong (using the keyboard to preserve the timing).

The end result is here:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/26585899/Corrected.wav

Granted, it's still not perfect and some notes are still missing, but with a few minutes of work you can get something. I would encourage you to keep practicing with the feature. Eventually, you'll find a way to play and to record that will make it easier for the conversion to pick up your notes, to the point where you can get going in seconds. You may also want to try singing, depending on the type of melody.

Good luck!

Carl

[sowhoso]

thx for all that Carl!

i had been using Convert harmony, altho i did try Convert Melody at one point

the point on moving transient marker, i didn't think of that

[melocoton]

I guess I'm not getting the transient thing. I just sang a bass part along to a click and converted it to midi. Then I took the same audio clip and quantized it, fixing any warp markers that were off and making sure that each note had its own marker snapped to the grid and anything that I didn't want to be a note didn't have a warp marker. Then I converted that one to midi and compared the two midi clips. The notes were identical apart from small timing differences due to the quantization. Wrong notes, missing notes, and added glitchy notes were identical on each. It doesn't seem like the warp markers had any effect at all on the conversion.