Mp3 -> Mid

I didn't think that was possible, I know midi can be coverted to MP3 with a bit of trouble (Ie GarageBand and Dent-Du-Midi) but not the reverse.

Isn't MIDI separated into different tracks? How would a free software converter be sophisticated enough to be able to identify and separate all the different elements in a song?

It's worse than that - MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the instructions for playing the song, the digital sheet music as it were. The MIDI stream contains the voice (piano, violin, flanged guitar, volcanic eruption etc) the notes, attack and decay speed and so on. Recreating MIDI information from an MP3 file would be equivalent of making annotated source code from a compiled application. In other words, it isn't going to happen.

There is a program called Midi2Wav (http://www.midi2wav.com)

The catch?... It's for Windows. I don't know the system requirements but there is a demo on the website you can try.

cirias

For some reason I was thinking midi->mp3 conversion rather than mp3->midi conversion. The app above does midi->wav (which can then be encoded to mp3).

As for converting mp3's, acme is right, there's no solution. Sorry for the confusion.

cirias

The other catch, it's for converting Midi files to wav (and others)...not from wav to midi which I would have to agree is pretty impossible to achieve automatically.

I SERIOUSLY need some sleep. Okay. For some reason, I was stuck on the fact that I had somewhere read it was somewhat possible to do audio to midi conversion. A buddy of mine just reminded me of Audio-to-Midi (http://www.mp3towav.org/TS-AudioToMIDI/) which is again, a Windows app. There are actually several at the mp3towav.org site but Audio to Midi is the cheapest I think. Anyway, I'm going to bed now, I haven't slept in a few days.

cirias

PS I'll rethink this thoroughly tomorrow.

Interesting. Tried it out in some Bach organ (lots of single note passages and some monster chords). The results were moderately recognizeable. The Dr. Who theme sounded like the cat was playing on the synthesizer keyboard and Bananarama and AC/DC were way beyond it's capacity. I suspect that if you have a passage recorded on a single instrument it will make a decent MIDI stream, but multi-voice, multi-channel reverse processing isn't going to sound the way you want it to.

"It's a cruel, cruel summer of the Daleks, done dirt cheap!" Meow!

Real close yellow - but I used the 'alternative' version of AC/DC - Done with Sheep. You see 'ol Angus in a totally different light.

Done with sheep! LOL!

www.lyricsbox.com (http://www.lyricsbox.com/dr-demento-lyrics-dirty-deeds-done-with-sheep-bhfvn1h.html)

and another favourite (http://www.lyricsbox.com/weird-al-yankovic-lyrics-amish-paradise-cmh75bb.html)

I guess you can compare mp3 to MIDI to the early days of OCR - computers reading text from a printed page.

As far as song lyrics go, let's not leave out "... 'scuse me while I kiss this guy"

More fractured lyrics at:

http://www.kissthisguy.com/

When I was a kid, I heard the song "Johnny Angel" and I thought they were singing "Johnny's in jail".

Yeesh... I'm old.

Just out of interest, is this one of your own compositions, as I have never failed to find a single MIDI file I wanted somewhere out there on the net, so maybe a better idea just to search for that instead!

As far as I am aware, it can't be done :( . Going the other way isn't too difficult, if you have 2 computers (or a friend with a laptop they can bring over). Link the sound cards together with a 3.5mm plugged cable (line out to line in), play the midi with cakewalk or similar decent midi file player (forget Windows media player) and record on the other machine (musicmatch is ideal - you can record directly as mp3). Getting a program to convert the one to the other is not really feasible - a MIDI is not, strictly speaking, an audio file. Linking 2 machines is about the only way you will get a reasonable result.

I know this is an old thread, but since it has been brought up recently..

MIDI to MP3 conversion is as simple as dragging the MIDI into iTunes, selecting it, then choosing 'Advanced>Convert Selection to MP3' (or AAC, AIFF, WAV, etc.)

More about MP3 to MIDI is on this thread (http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=29265). See post #19 for a link to a program that does seemingly do something of this sort however. (Although I believe it's Windows only)

It's worse than that - MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the instructions for playing the song, the digital sheet music as it were. The MIDI stream contains the voice (piano, violin, flanged guitar, volcanic eruption etc) the notes, attack and decay speed and so on. Recreating MIDI information from an MP3 file would be equivalent of making annotated source code from a compiled application. In other words, it isn't going to happen.

Another way to explain it is that MP3, WAV, etc. are like movies (bitmaps), and MIDI is like a Flash animation (objects). You can easily turn a Flash object animation into a movie file, but it is just about impossible to turn a live-action movie into a true Flash animation because it is not easy to determine all of the individual objects, where they start and end, their true position in space, properties, etc. It is just as impossible to properly identify which MIDI instruments and properties would accurately represent a particular MP3, largely because finished audio usually includes heavy multitrack layering of audio engineering and effects that obscure the actual properties of the original voices and instruments.

We must be careful not to confuse converting MIDI to MP3 and MP3 to MIDI.
styrafoam is right in what he/she says, but here is a mug's guide:
MIDI > MP3 = Dead Easy and making excellent results.
MP3 > MIDI = Difficult, slow and makes a sound like someone throwing a grand piano, the guy playing it, the stool he was sitting on, and his cat through a fourth-floor window.
I've played around a bit with a similar program (for windows) and the results are abysmal. Only very simple tunes with one instrument are recognisable when they come out the other end. Most things just sound like breaking glass. I now officially give up.

MP3>MIDI is definately not worth it. As I said earlier, far better results can be obtained by entering '"the song you want" midi' into google or similar!

Well I tried that, but the song is not at all well known. It is 'Legacy' by the Gone Jackals, and there doesn't seem to be a MIDI of it in existence.