Old 10-07-2011, 09:27 AM   #1
msore
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Default making MIDI from audio

Sorry if I am dense, but there must be a simple Reaper tool for taking an audio signal and assigning approximated MIDI notes to it. Yes, no? Thanks.
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Old 10-07-2011, 09:45 AM   #2
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Sorry if I am dense, but there must be a simple Reaper tool for taking an audio signal and assigning approximated MIDI notes to it. Yes, no? Thanks.
i don't know if there is something in Reaper but you can use Bidule to do this. There some Bidule patch that translate audio in midi.
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Old 10-07-2011, 10:29 AM   #3
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Try using ReaTune. There's a tick box for "Send MIDI events when pitch changes."

You could have this on the audio track with a send to your virtual instrument track. Or whatever.

Probably best to record the midi notes, then ditch the audio track and make adjustments to the midi.
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Old 10-07-2011, 11:14 AM   #4
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Converting audio to MIDI is EXTREMELY difficult. There are tools that'll help, but expect it to take a long time and deliver imperfect results.
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Old 10-07-2011, 01:14 PM   #5
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Default will check

THanks all.
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Old 10-07-2011, 07:08 PM   #6
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I tried the ReaTune approach. Interestingly, I could create a dynamic send-receive pair of tracks that did CREATE midi notes based on the originally recorded guitar audio signal (when hitting either Record or Play) HOWEVER the resulting MIDI item did not have any MIDI notes in it to be edited. And when I copied it and pasted it somewhere else, the MIDI versions of the original guitar notes disappeared. I could assign a different VSTi voice (piano, organ, etc) to the output, but those resulting MIDI notes disappeared when not linked to the original audio.

It was like the MIDI versions were being created on the fly, but not being written into a midi media item.

The translation of sounds (from audio to MIDI) was pretty interesting. Not as "accurate" as my brain would expect, but interesting and cool. Definitely useful if I could GET editable MIDI notes to stick around to be edited.

Hmm.
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Old 10-07-2011, 08:27 PM   #7
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I didn't realize ReaTune did that.

I've used Melodyne to do this, and it worked pretty well, creating a standard mid file.

Maybe try the demo version of Melodyne.......
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Old 10-08-2011, 01:25 AM   #8
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ReaTune does it just fine. I'm not sure why msore could not make it work correctly. I do it this way:

1. Send the audio to a track with ReaTune on
2. Have ReaTune send MIDI when pitch changes
3. Record the MIDI output of the ReaTune track.

Depending on the quality of the audio (scratching, imperfect notes etc) the recorded MIDI will be better or worse, but manual editing fixes that. You may also have to experiemnt with ReaTune settings to get better MIDI output.

This is the main way I do my bass-lines; record them played on guitar, turned into MIDI as per above, then quantized and velocity tweaked manually, to finally be played back by EVM Bassline. Schwa's midi_humanizer is added to give less robotic feel.
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Old 10-08-2011, 04:23 AM   #9
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Fabian, that's a good idea about using guitar to get your basslines. I find myself using my guitar to write the bass parts pretty often anyway because it's already in my hands, so I'll give this a shot. My bass needs work and I often use a synth bass sound instead anyway.
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Old 10-08-2011, 06:06 AM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jacobestes View Post
Fabian, that's a good idea about using guitar to get your basslines. I find myself using my guitar to write the bass parts pretty often anyway because it's already in my hands, so I'll give this a shot. My bass needs work and I often use a synth bass sound instead anyway.
Try EVM Bassline (just google), it's a free plugin, Has some good sounds. I've found that if I pitch the guitar down one octave and mix that with the EVM plugin output I get a little more twang in the sound, and it sounds more lively.
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Old 10-08-2011, 08:22 AM   #11
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Default help??

Fabian, thanks and can you tell me what I might be missing here. I have an audio track (electric guitar) playing a melody. I want to have that melody line echoed (unison) by saxophone VSTi on a second track. I put ReaTune on the first track and click the button to send MIDI when pitch changes, and then SEND this to the second track. Also assigned the second MIDI track to RECEIVE from track one and set that track to SOLO. Also armed the second track to record and clicked on input monitoring, indicated its input to be ALL MIDI to ALL CHANNELS, and set cursor to start point. Then hit the big red RECORD button. The result coming out of the speakers (out of MIDI track) is the COMBINATION of audio and MIDI (gtr and sax). When it is done, I have a new MIDI item but it is BLANK and opening it shows NO NOTES.


gracias.
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Last edited by msore; 10-08-2011 at 09:17 AM.
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Old 10-08-2011, 10:01 AM   #12
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Originally Posted by msore View Post
Fabian, thanks and can you tell me what I might be missing here. I have an audio track (electric guitar) playing a melody. I want to have that melody line echoed (unison) by saxophone VSTi on a second track. I put ReaTune on the first track and click the button to send MIDI when pitch changes, and then SEND this to the second track. Also assigned the second MIDI track to RECEIVE from track one and set that track to SOLO. Also armed the second track to record and clicked on input monitoring, indicated its input to be ALL MIDI to ALL CHANNELS, and set cursor to start point. Then hit the big red RECORD button. The result coming out of the speakers (out of MIDI track) is the COMBINATION of audio and MIDI (gtr and sax). When it is done, I have a new MIDI item but it is BLANK and opening it shows NO NOTES.


gracias.
Make sure you send only MIDI, and that you record track output. Other than that, I'm not sure what could be the problem. But get back here if it still doesn't work.
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Old 10-09-2011, 10:58 AM   #13
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Below is a track template set up to have audio on one track and record the MIDI on another. It works for me.

In addition, here's an explanation with pictures and all http://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.ph..._audio_to_midi
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Last edited by Fabian; 11-21-2023 at 12:56 PM.
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Old 10-11-2011, 08:31 AM   #14
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Default danke

Fabian thanks. I am down in Southern Utah at the Huntsman Senior Games this week (5 on 5 basketball) and will let you know how I worked it out. 'preciate it.
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Old 10-11-2011, 09:46 AM   #15
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Yet another reason to like ReaTune (even when Melodyne or Auto-tune r available.)

Also, it seems that the attack time on the Correction tab can be used as a sensitivity or accuracy control that can be adjusted to accommodate different kinds of lines.
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Old 10-11-2011, 03:29 PM   #16
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Default same line diff characteristics

Yes, MarahMag, I figured that out and the results are cool. So far I have combined several lines with different parameters, all playing in a very loose echoing unison of the same melodic phrase and it is cool.

After all. Don't people do that?
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Old 11-22-2011, 05:38 AM   #17
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Default Thanks Fabian (+ a ReaTune / Melodyne combo approach)

Hi all,

Fabian - thanks for your advice!! I knew there was an Audio-to-MIDI funtion somewhere in REAPER - had just forgotten that it was ReaTune.

For those with REAPER and Melodyne (might work for Autotune too? - not sure, never used it...)

Similar to Fabian's approach...
1) Edit/gate/noise-reduce the original audio (as far as possible) to get rid of extra noise etc between music phrases.

2) Load Melodyne (first!) and then ReaTune (second!) onto the track with audio on it.

3) Record audio into Melodyne and use Pitch Modulation and Pitch Drift functions to *reduce* (flatten) modulation and drift as far as possible - by doing this (as well as pitch-correcting as needed in Melodyne), I find ReaTune has to work less hard to output usable MIDI.

4) In ReaTune, turn on "Auto Correction" and "Send MIDI events when pitch changes" (I find that "double correcting" the pitch, using both Melodyne and ReaTune, makes the MIDI output more stable/usable).

5) Create a second track, and route Track 1 to Track 2 (Drag-and-drop from "Track Sends" area of Track 1 to anywhere on Track 2).

6) Load your fav. VSTi on Track 2, and as the original audio plays back,
play with the parameters in Melodyne and ReaTune to "preview" your MIDI output (it still probably won't be perfect yet, but hopefully will be musical enough to be worth recording & editting as needed)

7) Record-arm Track 2 in "Record-output(MIDI)" mode, and record MIDI output from ReaTune.

8) Edit MIDI as needed.

I've found that when flattenning pitch modulation and drift with Melodyne, while this helps the MIDI output of the musical parts of my audio, it increases artifacts, and these show up fairly strongly in any noise/non-musical passages (and so get recorded as MIDI output - typically a rapid succesion of MIDI notes that sweep up or down). Easy enough to edit out, but can be a bit off-putting at first.

Cheers,
Andrew
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Old 11-22-2011, 05:57 AM   #18
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this is the midi i got from melodyne dna when i ran a gtr figure through it.

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Old 11-27-2011, 01:12 PM   #19
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Marah Mag View Post
this is the midi i got from melodyne dna when i ran a gtr figure through it.

either you were playing some Origin type riffs or Caspar Brotzman

OR This is a dead end

seriously, reatune by itself works fine for simple linear bass lines...and thats about it
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Old 11-27-2011, 10:39 PM   #20
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hehe. That's how melodyne's dna analyzed a guitar line, from the end of the fx chain.

Was just single notes, but bursting with overtones & echos, which md midified poly.

Knowing the riff, I see it clearly in the contours of the midi.

It looks more chaotic than it is, which isn't really at all.
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Old 11-29-2011, 03:15 AM   #21
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i think the answer lies with the GR55 or Metalien as far as guitar to MIDI goes... i havent used them yet but from what i here they are your best bet...no latency (noticeable) and quite accurate
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Old 09-02-2014, 05:32 PM   #22
jbegan
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Default There are two standalone programs that will convert audio to midi

There are a couple of programs that will take an MP3 and convert to midi. They work best with single instrument and single note files, but neither work very well. For a laugh I tried to convert a violin piece to midi and it was particularly horrible, but it might work better on an instrument that didn't have bends and slides such as a piano. Anyway:

AmazingMidi is free: http://download.cnet.com/AmazingMIDI...-10034742.html


and
Intelliscore is 14 day trialware: http://download.cnet.com/Intelliscor...-10047406.html
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Old 09-03-2014, 12:10 PM   #23
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Default try this...

http://imitone.com/ bit of fiddling but its new and reached its goal on kickstarter, works pretty good dave
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Old 09-03-2014, 01:46 PM   #24
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7) Record-arm Track 2 in "Record-output(MIDI)" mode, and record MIDI output from ReaTune.
That's the part the OP seemed to be missing in previous posts. Right-click the Record enable button on the track receiving the midi, and choose that option.

These things can only analyze the sound they get and choose the most prominent frequency at any given time to spit out as MIDI. Excess harmonics in the signal itself can confuse it, as can lots of effects. Your brain is relatively good at finding (or even implying) the fundamental of the note, but it is mathematically very difficult. If you want best tracking, only send it perfectly clean signals, and try low passing as low as possible before impacting the fundamentals too much. It will sound pretty muddy on its own, but will give ReaTune (or whoever) less to sort through.

Note also that ReaTune's MIDI output is not velocity scaled to the audio input. Every note will be the same velocity no matter how loud the input is. I often use a JS that adjusts velocity set up with parameter modulation to follow the original audio signal.
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Old 09-04-2014, 03:45 AM   #25
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not relevant directly but,
just for the record about the Polyphonic Audio to Midi
there is one more:
http://www.capella.de/de/index.cfm/p...ella-wave-kit/
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Old 09-04-2014, 05:54 AM   #26
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I'd just add the thing that solved this issue for me. I got a cheepo M-Audio 2-octave keyboard and learned some very basic bassline and chord playing with the metronome just with one hand then played along
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Old 09-04-2014, 07:38 AM   #27
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...or you could buy a cheap electric bass. If you already play guitar, it's a lot easier to get the feel for bass than to learn to play keyboard.

I've actually found that setting the Playrate on a guitar track to 0.5 (preserve pitch off) actually makes a pretty convincing bass. It also shifts the frequency response down, but if you start with a bright tone on the guitar, it can often work. You have to play all of your bass parts at double time, though.

As for guitar>MIDI I use a Roland GK3/GI10 most of the time, though I actually did something with ReaTune last night. Something to keep in mind with ReaTune is that window time matters, especially for accuracy in the lower octaves. The low E on a guitar has a period of about 125ms. Folks have told me that these processes don't actually need a window that big to detect that note, but it sure seems to track better with the longer window.
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Old 09-04-2014, 07:54 AM   #28
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Some uses of audio-to-midi resist the "easy" answers, but are still useful. For example, sometimes I want to take a recording of someone's voice reading a story or poem, and create a vaguely similar "line" from it that can be manipulated using MIDI tools. Another example is when I "hear" in my head a line of improv that should be in a certain space in a composition, but I cannot play it on a MIDI instrument. What I can do in that case is sing it into a mic, run it through Reatune, and get a MIDI line that I can assign to one or multiple instruments for use in an arrangement. Another time, I created a MIDI melody by taking a rhythm beat out by hand (by a drummer friend - without drums) and transforming that into a melodic line. Fuzzy tools can be used quite creatively.
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Old 09-04-2014, 08:24 AM   #29
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Before I got the GK3, I had the GI10, but no working hex pickup. We used to plug a microphone into it, and just put that on the stage to try to figure out some note to play from the whole band sound. Between songs it would merrily tinkle along to our banter. Now that I'm using the GI10 for my guitar and running the whole mix through Reaper, I tried to send the whole mix through ReaTune and a VSTi for the same effect, but the laptop I use for that can't handle the extra CPU load, so I'm gonna have to upgrade soon.
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