MP3 or WAV to MIDI Conversion

[kelkinson]

I have a solo piano track I am trying to convert from Mp3 (or WAV) to a MIDI file. I have the file in Audacity (I believe the most recent beta for mac osx) and I go to export. First off, the export to MIDI option is greyed out, so I can't use that. Then I tried to use the general export, and that gave me a lot of options. There was no clear cut MIDI option, I tried a few of the other drop down uncompressed options, but none worked. I am thinking perhaps it is not possible - however I thought I read it was. Bottom line, I want to turn this mp3 (or it can be a WAV file) to a MIDI file, so that I can attempt to use some sort of transcribing software to see if I can get some sheet music. (I know it will probably have a lot of errors!) Thanks.

[whomper]

my understanding is that audacity does not do midi at all

changing sound to midi is hard
there are some programs that claim to do it
but you ahve to pay to get them
and yes you do get errors

i have no idea why a midi shows up even grayed out
perhaps remnants of a grand plan long ago that got cancelled

feature request
remove that old midi teaser so it does not show

[steve]

Audacity 1.3.12 currently supports the display of midi data.
Although Audacity does not currently support playing MIDI, the display can be useful to musicians that are wanting to synchronise audio with MIDI.
The MIDI features in Audacity are being actively developed but are unlikely to be seen in any release version before the release of Audacity 2.

Converting monophonic sounds to MIDI data can be done fairly accurately these days, but requires specialised software. Audacity does not do this.
Converting polyphonic sounds to MIDI data is much harder and several programs have made significant steps toward achieving this (all such programs that I know of are non-free commercial programs that are easily found on Google).