"Problematic" conversion from MIDI: c4*5, c1 (in 3/4 time) etc.

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hello,

I have a midi file that I wanted to convert into scores, but the
scores simply don't look right.

While I have a real (relatively long) song in the MIDI, I believe that
I can fully reproduce the problem with the following simple example:

    \score {
      \new Voice = "melody" {
        \set Staff.midiInstrument = "accordion"
        \time 3/4
        \relative c' {
          c4 c c |
          c1 d4 e |
          f4*5 g4 |
          f2.~ | % becomes f4*5
          f2 e4 |
          d4*3 | % becomes d2.
          c4 c2~ | % becomes c1
          c2
        }
      }
      \midi { \tempo 4 = 160 }
      \layout {}
    }

(I picked accordion because one doesn't hear the duration with piano.)

The idea is to make midi from the above example first (lilypond
test.ly), then convert midi to scores (midi2ly test.midi -o test2.ly)
and typeset again (lilypond test2.ly).


The resulting MIDI file sounds right, but the typesetting of it is
very strange. I get just a single quarter note printed out rather than
something that takes the duration of five times a quarter.

OK, that's probably expected when I consciously enter the above
syntax, but not after conversion from a MIDI file.

I noticed that the whole idea of the asterisk operator is to print a
single unit, but to prolong it in MIDI (or for other purposes). But
there's a lot of inconsistency:
- if I properly enter c2.~ c2, I get c4*5 from the midi conversion
- if I properly enter c2~ c2, I get c1 which is "forbidden" inside 3/4
- if I sloppily enter c4*3 which would typset in a very weird way, it
comes out OK after the conversion as c2.

None of that makes any sense to me.

Sure I can manually fix the resulting plain text file, but I was
wondering if there was really no better way to get this done properly
and automatically.

Thank you,
    Mojca

(PS: please CC me in reply.)