I have been playing with the Audio to MIDI program for two days now,
dropping all important work and having fun. I have been communicating
with two other users who have made some very helpful suggestions.
The program does a great job with good quality audio files for input,
otherwise it's "Garbage in, Garbage out!"

I have spent a lot of hours on the Chopin Mazurkas played by Michael
Block. I am not a big fan of the mazurkas the way most people play them
as boring, plodding early 19th century dance music. Block gives them
a life that others do not. I thought it would be great if I could play
his interpretations on my 9-foot Knabe. Well, until just a couple of
hours ago, I was about to give up.

There is a known problem with the Audio to MIDI program as to the
way it handles notes played with the sustain pedal on. A quick fix is
to shorten the length of all notes that are on when the pedal is also
on but this does not fix the Block files -- they still sound muddy and
over-pedaled.

It turns out that the sustain pedal off codes are somewhat too late,
which I discovered after shifting then as suggested by a fellow user.
I really thought that the files would need individual hand editing,
which is not something I am good at. I used to be pretty good at writing
programs to modify MIDI files in even somewhat complicated ways but this
cannot fix problems unless they themselves are systemic in nature.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the last processing.
In it Michael Block's performance really shows as opposed to it being
an over-pedaled mess. For those who are familiar with this sort of
stuff here is the process I subjected the files to.

1. Make the MIDI file from an MP3 audio file.

2. Convert to MIDI Type 0 file format because the MIDI Type 1 has
strange track usage and my programs work better with Type 0. They are
all supposed to work with Type 1 too but I might have left out multiple
track processing and merging in one or more of the programs that
I rarely use.

3. Use Gapfixer to set the minimum gap to 125 milliseconds and the
minimum note length to 75 ms.

4. Shift [advance] the pedal off commands negative 75 ms. (I think
maybe it was more but I want to get this recorded as reference for now,
and can increase it later.)

5. Scale velocities to about 80% using MIDImod2, but it really needs
a little more reduction for most people.

6. Rename the final MIDI files to get rid of modified suffixes.

7. Convert to MP3 using Mid2pianoCD for the LX system.

I think that is about all... Oh, and then:

8. Listen to some amazing music.

At this point I am one happy camper!

Spencer Chase
Garberville, California

 [ Spencer offers many files and utility programs at
 [ http://www.spencerserolls.com/index.html 
 [ http://www.spencerserolls.com/Files4Download.html 
 [ http://www.spencerserolls.com/LX_tools_information.html 
 [ -- Robbie