John Henckel, Laura Conrad, John Burton and Jon F McNamara has all come
up with various good ideas for converting midis to sheet music. I might
add Finale myself, a professional music typesetting program far more
advanced than (and half as expensive as) Sibelius.
Unfortunately, most of those ideas do not adress what actually was the
issue here: converting midis to *ABC*.
Melody Assistant / Harmony Assistant might be an alternative, but
honestly I find the program(s) a bit too expensive, especially since you
really don't know what you get before you pay (the free demos available
are so limited it's impossible to judge from them).
midi2abc seems actually to do a fair job interpreting midi files, it's
the ABC part of the program that seems to be the problem. Here are a few
exemples taken from my attempts to convert Terpsichore:
A2 c2-<c/B2-B/A|
instead of:
A2 c2 B3A|
G,2-<G,/G,2-G,/A, G,2|
instead of:
G,2 G,3A, G,2|
c2-<c/e2-e/c|
instead of:
c2e e2c|
B/c<dc/B|
instead of:
B/c/ d>cB|
The last one seems to be an midi2abc favourite, popping up all the time.
Another problem with midi2abc is that most of the rather impressive
selection of transcription options simply don't work.
There is however, nothing in midi2abc that some rather simple
post-processing can't fix. Doing this manually might or might not take a
lot of time (no. 1 in Terpsichore took me more than an hour, while no.
29 didn't need any editing at all), but it shouldn't be too hard to
write a perl script or something to do most of it. I can't write a perl
script to save my life, though.
Frank Nordberg
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