Transcription from Recordings

[michael sam wild]

Has anyone any up to date news on transcription programmes that can do annotation from MP3 files or via WAV or MIDI. I have a lot of transcribing of old tapes of singers from the 70s which have been digitised as MP3 and would like to save some time. Another way may be to hold a mic up to the MP3 player and use my Zoom recorder and thence via Tabledit

Edited January 16, 2013 by michael sam wild

[wes williams]

I'm confused.

Another way may be to hold a mic up to the MP3 player ...

MP3 players usually connect directly to the computer. Did you mean CASSETTE player?

[Alex West]

You can use Audacity to import an MP3 file as a "Project" and edit it from there. For example if you have a very large MP3 which is an entire LPs worth of music, you can use Audacity to cut it into segments ("tracks") and save them as individual MP3 files. If you have the native tapes (or cassettes or LPs), you can also record the music into Audacity by taking an audio lead from the cassette player into the microphone socket on your computer (very intuitive but there are also some simple instructionals on the internet). and then edit the resulting project file into individual "tracks"

 

Was this what you were trying to do?

 

Alex West

[hjcjones]

I don't think Audacity can convert a track to musical notation, which I think is what Mike is after.

 

I don't have Tabledit so I may be wrong, but I think it can accept input from a midi instrument and turn it into notation. I don't think it can do this with audio files but you may be able to convert them to midi - there are programs which claim to do this but I'm not sure how reliable they are. My guess is that most of them will struggle with unaccompanied folk songs which don't keep a strict tempo.

[David Barnert]

Has anyone any up to date news on transcription programmes that can do annotation from MP3 files or via WAV or MIDI.

 

MIDI should be easy. I'm sure there are dozens of programs that will convert MIDI to abc or other notation. But that won't help you with live recordings.

 

For TunePal to work, it must convert audio input into some sort of notation, so the technology must be there, but I don't know what's out there in terms of available products.

[shelly0312]

David, didn't someone along the line allude that YOU were the technology? You can translate by ear to notations? I'd call that a better gift than "perfect pitch"! shelly

[gcoover]

If you have a single note melody input you can try Audacity to convert mp3 to midi, and use a different program to go from midi to notation, but it's a far from perfect process and only results in a melody line that usually needs a ton of cleaning up anyway. There's just way too much going on in your standard sound file for any program to magically convert it into notation, and there's no way at all if there are several instruments and sounds happening at once. So far, the human brain is the best computer for doing this!

Gary

[michael sam wild]

As we suspected it's tricky we tried a free programme to convert MP3 to MIDI it sounded like a manic pianola and the display showed hundreds of notes , no way to isolate a melody line. As you say back to the brain cell! My grandaughter can pick out her mum's voice in a crowd

[David Barnert]

David, didn't someone along the line allude that YOU were the technology? You can translate by ear to notations? I'd call that a better gift than "perfect pitch"! shelly

 

What a memory. You must be referring to this thread from 2007. Note particularly posts 6 - 10.

 

But your post reminds me that many of those who want transcription software want it to save them from having to learn to take dictation, rather than to save scribbling. My advice would be to learn to do it without the software and only then (if such software becomes available and reliable) get it to make your life easier and save on scribbling.