Cheapest and fastest way to turn a piece of music on paper into MIDI

October 29, 2009 8:57 PM

What's the fastest and cheapest way to create a midi recording of a 1 or 2 page written melody?

I have pieces of vocal music and i would like to know how they sound. The music's got dotted rhythms and tied notes. No triplets (yet) but would be nice if the technique supported that. These are simple vocal lines (no chords).

I'm fine with techniques that use a short-hand to enter the notes rather than inputting the actual score. Speed and cheapness is what i'm after.

posted by storybored to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Reaper
posted by bigmusic at 9:09 PM on October 29, 2009

Are you on Windows, Mac, Linux?

For free and open source software, there's MuseScore (Linux, Mac and Windows). Haven't tried it myself (yet) -- it was recommended in a post over at superuser.

Also check out this previous AskMe thread: "Mac music notation composer?" for a few more suggestions (not all Mac-only). BTW, from that thread, there's a reference to Finale Notepad being free, but that's changed and it's now US$9.95 (you can try it for free for 30 days though). It's available for Mac and Windows.

The question for that same thread also mentions Noteworthy Composer (Windows only), which has a free trial version.
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 9:42 PM on October 29, 2009

I just did a bunch of scoring with MuseScore. It's very powerful for a free program, although I found the interface annoying and it crashed on me a lot. Overall I'd still recommend it.
posted by ludwig_van at 10:01 PM on October 29, 2009

I've never used MuseScore, but back when I wanted to do this I would use Anvil Studio. Interface was not ideal on it either, but it did get the job done, and was totally free.
posted by kingjoeshmoe at 12:17 AM on October 30, 2009

Another alternative is Lilypond, which is for setting scores but will output a MIDI file, and I've used it in the past precisely for the job you mention (my sight-reading skills at the keyboard aren't quite there). It uses a similar syntax to LaTeX, so the notes are input to a mark-up file which is then rendered. Once you have the hang of that it's very quick, though there's the learning curve, obviously.

(The scores it makes are very nice, too, but I realise that's not what you're after).
posted by Grangousier at 12:47 AM on October 30, 2009

The very simplest way to do this is as old as the internet: the ABC Music File.
posted by Aquaman at 8:27 AM on October 30, 2009

You said you wanna know how they sound. Does it have to be MIDI then? I had a search for online notation software out of interest. A few likely looking links...the first one seems to work ok for entering notes and playing back what you've written.
posted by Not Supplied at 8:52 AM on October 30, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks for all the leads, everyone.

@Rangefinder - PC only!

@Aquaman - ABC looks promising but where can i find the ABC2mid program that it mentions?

@Grangousier - i will check out lilypond

@bigmusic - nice package but is more $ than i wanted to spend

Will also check out musescore
posted by storybored at 11:58 AM on October 30, 2009

I'm almost positive that Noteflight provides exporting to MIDI (as well as printing sheet music, etc.). I used Noteflight to score some parts not too long ago and found it pretty easy and relatively full-featured. It's web-based, and oh--it's FREE.
posted by ViolaGrinder at 12:33 PM on October 30, 2009

Seconding lilypond. I play trumpet; when I was learning to read, I re-typeset all my pieces in lilypond so I could hear them. A nice side-effect was that I now have lots of well-typeset easy music. (And it's trivially easy to transpose it to any key or clef.)

Incidentally, the MIDI file format is quite simple. If you have any scripting skills you can probably write a little MIDI generator using the language of your choice.
posted by phliar at 4:25 PM on October 30, 2009