Re: Midi entry

[Richard Shann]

On Wed, 2016-07-27 at 00:25 +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On 26 July 2016 at 17:01, Richard Shann wrote:
> > On Tue, 2016-07-26 at 15:45 +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> >
> > I think the first track is just being used to vary the tempo. Whether
> > that is because it originated in a human performance (it would be a
> > sophisticated program that generated this in that case)
> 
> Yes, I agree :)
> I suspect computers ...
> 
> > or some sort of
> > human-modified MIDI performance (you could easily "conduct" a MIDI
> > performance causing the tempo to vary throughout and record the modified
> > MIDI by adding a track with the tempo changes that you conducted).
> >
> >> In any case, I got reasonable output for at least some midi files with
> >>
> >>     midi2ly -a --duration-quant=16 --key=-1 --start-quant=16 file.midi
> >
> > Interestingly, Denemo creates reasonable output straight out of the box
> > - in many ways a measure of its crudity - it ignores all those tempo
> > changes and so you get one empty staff and then the four parts. If that
> > was a hard as it got, you could write a script to output the parts into
> > your own templates quite easily.
> 
> I realized that Denemo comes as a binary for Mac, so I tested it now,

I wonder on which file?

> but it doesn't seem to like the original MIDI file. Not being familiar
> with its GUI interface, I'm completely confused, but after importing
> the MIDI and pressing play, I get some semi-nonsense out of it.

with the "Se kiklco prodala bom.MID" file you sent it would not load at
all, because it didn't like .MID, changing that to .mid it loaded and
then I got the semi-nonsense you describe here:

>  It
> doesn't seem to be able to handle chords at all (it just ignores the
> upper pitch),

yes, it seems to have nothing for chord recognition, well, it must have
recognized the chords as it has ignored the higher notes rather than
linearizing them (MIDI does not represent chords, it just puts all the
notes of the chord in one after the other with hopefully the same or
similar timings - Denemo must be noticing the same timings and
over-writing the note, which surprises me).
>  it linearizes stuff, so I get weird alterations between
> the basses and the main melody 

yes, I heard that - again it is not so much Denemo that is linearizing
something, just that the bass and melody notes are in alternating
positions on the same track
> (with durations of 8. instead of 4 and
> 2), but the timings are all wrong. Not wrong in the sense of wrong
> quantisation, 

 MIDI can provide hints about the notation to use (4/4, 3/4 etc), and
Denemo seems to take some of it on board - without knowing what it
should look like it is difficult to say.

> but there is something horribly wrong with the import.

yes! I'm fairly sure it is cruder than midi2ly, just a few lines of C I
think. But it does occasionally do the job - as in the first example of
yours that I tested, where I only had to delete the top staff and change
the Tenor and Bass to Bass clef to get a plausible score.

> 
> By picking a guided import it does something completely different, but
> still completely useless.

Yes, that would be quite useless in this case - you would have to guide
the import note by note of each track. It does have the chords in that
case, you can see them as a series of input pitches all piled up at the
same time in the score, you would choose the duration (if it wasn't
right) and install them into a chord with the Ins key. 

Richard