Re: Changing and playing a different instrument in MIDI

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 22 July 2016 at 11:46, Robert Blackstone wrote:
> On 22 Jul 2016, at 08:51 , Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I don't have much experience with MIDI. I just tried all the media
>> players on OS X and realized than only QuickTime Player 7 had some
>> very very basic support for playing MIDI files (I cannot even make it
>> play loud enough, let alone do anything else with it). None of the
>> others I have installed worked (VLC, MPlayerX, QuickTime Player,
>> RealPlayer, ...)
>>
>> So I went on and made a package for TiMidity++ and freepats.
>>
>> The problem is: I'm still unable to figure out how to change the
>> instrument to anything but Piano.
>
> Hello Mojca,
> Although I cannot offer a solid solution for your problem with the instrument 
> playing your midi-file I can suggest a hack or at least a way to get what you 
> want to hear.
>
> By accident I found that when I click on a LilyPond midi-file it opens in 
> Finale, giving me the score and the means to play and change the instrument 
> into whatever I like.
> I guess that as  a "LilyPonder" you don't have Finale but maybe one of your 
> friends has it, who can do it for you and save the audio file with the 
> instrument of your choice.

True: I don't have Finale. I'm not a musician, let alone a composer.
But certainly not someone willing to buy expensive software for what
is a mere hobby. Plus, the "plain text" mode of lilypond offers quite
some benefits over commercial solutions / GUI tools, in particular if
we plan to start some collaboration to create an "open source"
collection of national songs (which could then easily be rearranged,
transposed, etc.).

(If this was a "one time need", I could use the opportunity, but I
cannot beg either you or other human being to keep fixing my midi
files on a regular basis.)

It would also be a nice experiment to figure out how to create a sound
font from recordings of the highest quality instrument.

Off-topic:

That said, I wouldn't mind suggestions for some good OpenSource (GUI)
MIDI editors. I have a bunch of weird MIDI files that I would like to
turn into scores. They sound OK, but I'm not exactly sure if they were
just obfuscated on purpose or if they are recordings of "human
players" and thus the timings are some horrible (i)rational numbers.

A friend of mine also has a midi interface for her accordion and I'm
thinking of asking her to play some of the songs she knows and then
turn them into nicely typeset scores (hoping that there is a way to do
that faster than by asking her to play it slowly and write everything
down as she plays).

I did try to play with different settings of midi2ly, but didn't yet
find the magic recipe for fixing the timing of those (obfuscated?)
MIDIs.

I checked some software websites, but the software usually has to be
compiled/packaged first (I need it for OS X), so I better pick the
best one from the start before spending hours resolving all
dependencies and reporting all the compile problems upstream :)

Reasonably priced commercial software would also be fine.

In any case I'll first try to get a bit more out of midi2ly to see
what can reasonably be done automatically. But I'll ask in a different
thread.

> If necessary I could do it for you.

This could be done once, but not on regular basis, so it doesn't really help.

Mojca