Re: midi2ly

[Antonio PALAMA']

I have to disagree with Mats; a properly encoded midifile contains more 
information than a printed score.
A printed score contains all the information necessary to a musician to 
play the music. A midi file contains the actual performance of the musician.
The problem is that the two encodings are completely different and many 
shorthands are used in a printed score to simplify the typesetting which 
are equivalent to complex midi constructs (e.g. articulations). Some 
information available on the printed score may be unavaliable in the 
midifile (e.g. fingering instructions) but this is not essential. Also, 
as Mats points out, converting the timing information of a live rocorded 
midifile to note durations  can be very difficult unless one has the 
possibility to filter the midifile trough a sequencer program with the 
"fit improvisation" function.
I wrote another conversion program from midi to lilypond 
(www.nongnu.org/mi2ly) and would be interested in trying it on one of 
the midifiles you were not able to translate with midi2ly. Unfortunately 
the program is not yet able to process chords nor multiple voices per track.
Regards,
Antonio Palama'

address@hidden wrote:

> Thanks Mats. You were right my problem was with the syntax; and, 
> importing files from midi is not going to save much work. Another 
> problem is that not all Type 1 midi files are recognized by midi2ly. 
> Conversely the midi files created by Lilypond are not recognized by my 
> Windows based notation program( an old version of Cakewalk). They are 
> recognized by Windows Media Player and Winamp. This is all very 
> interesting. I am not a programmer, but I am quickly getting used to 
> the syntax in Lilypond. It is very intuitive, and aside from a few 
> minor inconveniences, it is a wonderful tool. Thanks for your help.
> Pat
>
> --- Mats Bengtsson <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> From: Mats Bengtsson <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 10 Apr 2005 12:21:58 +0200
> To: address@hidden
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: midi2ly
>
> My guess is that your real problem is a lack of understanding about the
> file system structure
> in Cygwin (which is the LINUX like system that you run when you use the
> Cygwin command
> prompt). When you start the Cygwin command prompt, you will be in your
> Cygwin home directory,
> which is the folder with your login name located below C:cygwinhome.
> So, you could either
> use that as your working directory, i.e. move your MIDI files there, or
> you could change working
> directory using the command 'cd'. The conventions are slightly different
> than usual Windows. For
> example, to move to the folder to C:Documents and
> SettingsubbagDesktop, you should
> run the command
> cd /cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/bubbag/Desktop/
>
> Having said all this, I can warn you that you probably will not find
> midi2ly that useful anyway,
> since a MIDI file only contains a small part of the information
> contained in a normal printed
> score and it also is tricky for a program to get the rhythm right unless
> the MIDI file was produced
> by some other notation program.
>
> /Mats