Does anyone know of a way to scan sheet music (or use a PDF sheet music file) and convert it into Midi so that I can get it into Audacity?
PS … I wasn’t sure what “category” to put this in. I hope I picked the right one.
Audacity doesn’t DO MIDI. That seems like a question for Google or ChatGPT.
Don’t you have a File > Import > Midi ?
It appears to be there on my system.
I believe they’re also called “Note Tracks.”
Maybe I wasn’t totally clear in my question. I’m not expecting Audacity itself to create the midi file. I just thought that there might be other users here who have been down this road before and could offer some advice on how they’ve started with sheet music (or a PDF) and eventually gotten it in to a midi (or note) track.
A quick search came up with Scanscore and Scan2Notes. Maybe one of those will help you.
With some good luck, some chat AI might do it with its standalone logic, not sure about it, but there are so many todays, and each time more powerful, and some have a premium variants that do things that the basic chats don’t, you might have one at your reach by now, worth checking.
Someone on the Rosegarden forum suggested “Audiveris”
I gave it a quick try and it seems to work. It outputs MusicXML and then that can be converted to Midi. At least it works well for a fairly simple score.
Warning: Don’t try the Audivers (dot) com site. It looks good, but when you click on the links it takes you to spam, gambling, and porn sites. There’s a warning about it on the Github page.
I was going to suggest that too.
It’s free, open source, and cross-platform (Windows / Mac / Linux).
One point worth noting though is that it does not output as MIDI. It outputs as musicxml. To convert to MIDI, use Audiveris to convert to musicxml, then you can use Denemo to convert from musicxml to MIDI.
Audacity only has very basic support for MIDI, and it’s rather buggy in most Audacity3.x versions. For playing MIDI files with Audacity, I’ve found Audacity 2.4.2 works best - it’s available from Old Audacity versions download if you don’t already have it (scroll way down the page to find it). If you want to do more than just playing the MIDI file, a dedicated “MIDI Sequencer” is probably your best bet (I use MusE but I think it’s Linux only).
WARNING
Avoid the site https://audiveris.com - it’s a scam site.
The correct site is: Audiveris Pages | Audiveris documentation
and the user handbook is: Audiveris Handbook | Audiveris Pages
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That’s very helpful. I am actually using LillyPond to go from XML to Midi. If I understand the Denemo page, it looks like that’s a front-end to Lilypond. I have been using Frescobaldi as the front-end. No idea what their relative merits are. I just do the conversion with the command line.
I checked my Audacity version. One system has 2.4.2 and another has 3.4.2. It looks like those versions were just what was current in the linux repositories when I installed the individual systems. If I have trouble with the newer one I’ll see if I can backtrack to version 2.
Funny that rendering Midi got worse in newer versions. I had been using Rosegarden. Then I switched to Ardour because it also ran on Windows, which was used by some people I’m working with. But it turned out that they were more familiar with Audacity, so now I’ve been using that. The Midi is mostly just to put in some temporary tracks for missing instruments. I definitely doesn’t have to be production quality. But it needs to basically work. We’ll see how that goes.
Interesting site.
Audiveris (in conjunction with Lilypond) appears to be doing the job. I’m not scanning anything particularly complex. Just using it to create some temporary tracks for practicing with instruments that we don’t currently have available.