I realize that Audicity is not fully compatible with Catalina, but is this the reason that I can’t export an MP3 or WAV file to MIDI? I’m getting a message that reads: “Cannot export audio in this format.” I’m selecting Export Audio / “Other uncompressed files” / SDS / Signed 8-bit PCM. Any suggestions?
The reason that you can’t export audio as MIDI, is because MIDI is not audio. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI
Why do you need MIDI? Describe the job.
And no, it has nothing to do with Catalina. If you had an older machine we couldn’t do it then, either.
Koz
Here’s what I was looking at: https://www.videosolo.com/tutorials/convert-mp3-to-midi.html
I want to convert audio to MIDI in order to do various things with it the in the computer.
That explains why people show up on the forum wanting to convert music to MIDI.
I followed the instructions and I couldn’t do it, either.
This may be a developer question. Is this export menu item a mistake? Is this an FFMpeg mismatch?
Instructions like this never tell you which Audacity version they’re using—or at least I didn’t see it. You can also get rolling post errors. Somebody posts a mistake and everybody picks it up and repeats it.
Koz
I found a scholarly description of the service. It’s not converting a tune into MIDI. It’s allowing you to ship digital sound back and forth on the MIDI cable in addition to the MIDI commands. This means you can quickly and easily edit your MIDI song on a large computer with good monitor instead of a tiny MIDI device with small LCD screen.
I’m still not sure where Audacity fits in this. This could be a thing that happened since last time I played with MIDI. Both my computer and the MIDI device (Keyboard) had speakers and I didn’t have any trouble editing and managing MIDI commands and hearing what I was doing. I guess if you don’t have a large system like that, you would have to edit blind and that would be a pain.
Koz
To make things worse, that article, supposedly by Karen Nelson, is not only total rubbish, but is repeated on multiple websites and blogs, and is also used as click-bait for many scam / malware websites.
The basic problem with that tutorial is that it is totally wrong - absolute rubbish. A “Midi Sample Dump” is not a “MIDI file”. A “MIDI Sample Dump” is a SysEx MIDI protocol for transferring sample data to, or from a MIDI sampler.
Looks like I’m another person coming here for the same reason. I saw instructions online describing how Audacity can export MIDI from an audio file. From that I hoped to use another program to print the score from the MIDI file.
I followed the instructions and everything went exactly as shown except at the end I got a message saying “cannot export audio in this format” or something like that.
So now I’m back to square one in looking for a way to generate a MIDI file from an audio file on Mac Sierra or iOS.The one I have sort of works but is completely terrible in the number of errors produced. I would expect a few errors, but not hundreds.
However, all is not lost because I discovered what looks to be a very useful audio editor.
Converting audio to MIDI is difficult. Most programs that attempt to do it create hundreds of errors unless the audio is very simple (there are usually some errors even with simple audio).
The silver lining 