MIDI export help

[Skaven]

Hello everyone,

I got this interesting request from a school teacher in USA. He and his students would like to play a live strings and piano arrangement of the Bejeweled 3 soundtrack ("classic" game mode). For this they needed sheet notation of the music's basic melodic notes. This sounded very interesting, so I jumped at it.

I thought it would be simple: export from OpenMPT to MIDI, import to FL Studio, edit and clean up a little, use its sheet music exporter to create the notation. Presto.

It turned out to be a bit problematic. On MIDI export, OpenMPT allows me to choose a General MIDI instrument match for each instrument in the song. So far so good. However, after export it turns out that there are tons of Program Changes, so the export result is not a neat "all strings and chords in one piano roll", but rather, "a few string notes here, then some more in another piano roll, and if there is a chord, each note of the chord is on a separate piano roll and a separate channel". Exporting sheet music out of this would end up in a total mess. Especially since I sometimes jump an instrument from one tracker channel to another, just on the basis of "there happened to be room there".

Is there any way I could export the music to MIDI  in a more clean manner, as in, select all the string instruments I want to export into a single piano roll, or such?  Thanks!

(because if I just delete all the other instruments but the ones I want to export, the notes will still remain in the patterns, right?)

[Saga Musix]

MIDI export is very poor indeed, but I think what you might have forgotten to do is selecting an individual midi channel for each instrument - either in the instrument tab or when selecting the MIDI export instruments. If you distribute the instruments over the 16 MIDI slots carefully, you might be able to get better results.

[Skaven]

Thanks for the tip! I didn't know selecting the channels affects MIDI export, I'll try that.

If it's not unfeasible, could be nice to enhance the MIDI export functionality a bit with some kind of "select which instruments to export and which not" and/or "group these instruments to the same piano roll" kinds of options. Shall I make a feature suggestion?

[Skaven]

Thanks again for your tip, it was very helpful.    I was able to get sensible notation imported to FL Studio by doing the following:

1) In OpenMPT, assign each instrument type to a MIDI channel (these can be grouped sensibly, like, all strings to channel 1, etc)

2) When importing MIDI to FL Studio, disable the "Create one channel per track" option

Now the chord notes are all in one piano roll (instead of each on its own) and there is a minimum amount of program changes. Awesome!

[Saga Musix]

Glad to hear that it worked. I guess there is much room for improving the export (I wanted to rewrite it at some point anyway)... for now I guess I should mentioned that you can save a lot of work when directly choosing the MIDI channel and program in the instrument settings, because I think both settings are taken into account in the MIDI export dialog. That would at least solve the grouping problem a bit, but of course it won't work if there's a VSTi assigned to an instrument.

[christofori]

YAAY Skaven

Glad to see you're still using OMPT and popping by every so often!  Been a fan since I first heard some of your stuff from FC back 'in the day' -- and just wanted to publicly extend some 'greetz' of my own..

[mrvegas]

There is also some discussion of midi export and tips for bringing it up in notation editors in the Technical Documents section.