MIDI music software that outputs image sheet music?

January 24, 2006 12:10 PM

I'm looking for a tool similar to Noteworthy Composer in that I can open up MIDI files and extract sheet music from them, but I would like to be able to export the sheet music to an image format. Is there some sort of plugin or alternative software out there?
posted by Hot Like Your 12V Wire to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Pretty much any program that can print can generate a PDF using something like CutePDF Writer, and from there you can get to any format you want (though PDF is good enough for a lot of things).
posted by kindall at 12:14 PM on January 24, 2006

Finale's stuff used to output postscript files. I expect they would use PDF, now. Notepad is free, I believe, and Songwriter and PrintMusic are both cheap (under $80).

I haven't used their stuff for years, though, and can't tell you exactly what's in the current featureset of their various products.
posted by weston at 3:07 PM on January 24, 2006

If you're serious about it, Finale and Sibelius are both the industry standards for notation and composing (in a way, Finale more so than Sibelius -- but they are both great; I prefer the latter). Expect to spend a couple of hundred dollars -- and that's assuming you can swing the education discount. If you're currently using Noteworthy (a nice little program) and just want to output to an image, try something like CutePDF.
posted by rossination at 8:49 PM on January 24, 2006

The problem with converting midi files to sheet music, is that midi files that are well done are made not to sound like they are being played with by a computer, so the timing will be off in many places. That being said, Finale is a good choice. You can clean it up in Finale and send it to a pdf print driver.
posted by bigmusic at 9:19 PM on January 24, 2006

What bigmusic said, but I prefer Sibelius for this. Finale and Sibelius are both expensive, but look for educational discounts if you're a student. I believe Sibelius Student (ca. $80) will extract MIDI files, but you'd want to double check.
posted by al_fresco at 10:12 PM on January 24, 2006

If you're not afraid to get your hands dirty with the command line, nothing produces better output than LilyPond.
posted by Monochrome at 6:12 PM on January 26, 2006