Hi Eric, > Where is the guess work in MIDI files?
If MIDI was good enough for music notation, there would have been no need to invent MusicXML. We invented MusicXML because there was no adequate way to transfer music notation between applications. MIDI's inadequacy for music notation is hardly controversial. You can buy a whole book called "Beyond MIDI" from MIT Press on pretty much this one topic. I discussed some of the details in section 3 of my XML 2001 presentation, available online at: http://www.idealliance.org/papers/xml2001/papers/html/03-04-05.html There is no such thing a note, a rest, or a triplet in MIDI. MIDI just has events that say "here's the start of a note" and "here's the end of a note". There's no concept of a whole note, much less a tuplet. There's not even a distinction between a C# and a Db. And then we're not even getting into all the non-note markings like slurs, expressions, cresc and diminuendo marks, chord symbols, and more. You may not care about those, but others do. In any program, choosing the right quantization settings can make a big difference in how well the MIDI import works. This lets the program make better guesses when reading in the MIDI file. MusicXML is a far better format than MIDI for transfering this music notation information, because it represents all these musical concepts directly. There's no guesswork involved. MusicXML is free for any company to use in their products, just like MIDI. It seems less than ideal for MakeMusic to put more effort into supporting a format that is rapidly becoming obsolete for use with music notation. It's great that Logic and Digital Performer do a better job of importing MIDI files. I'm sure they put a lot of work into making the right guesses about how MIDI's synthesizer-based ideas translate into notation. MIDI was not designed to support music notation, and it is a tribute to a lot of skilled people over the years that it has worked as well as it did. But you will get better results going from Digital Performer to Finale if Digital Performer starts saving MusicXML files. That is true no matter how much time, money, and effort MakeMusic puts into better MIDI import. Best regards, Michael Good Recordare LLC www.recordare.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
