Reading and writing Midi files |
Watch also the following video:
The Midi file [Light] [Beginner] [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Choir] [Keyboard] [Soloist] A MIDI file is a file which contains Midi
information organized to form a full piece of music. It contains
one or more time sequences of MIDI instructions which describe
when and how the notes of the score must be played. Other
information specify which instruments play, volumes, various
controllers and other MIDI messages. The MIDI file is a universal format of musical
data exchange between various devices and computers. Pizzicato,
as most musical software, reads and writes MIDI files (except
Pizzicato Light, which does not read them). This is used to
exchange music documents between Pizzicato and other musical
software by going through the MIDI format. You need to understand very well that the
musical contents of a MIDI file contains only the start, the
duration, the force and the pitch of each played note. It is a
succession of instructions like this: It is the equivalent of information sent by
your musical keyboard to Pizzicato when you record a score in
real time. The graphic aspect of the score is not included
in a MIDI file. Let us take a simple example to explain this
difference. Let us consider the 3 following measures: The display is quite different for each but
when they are played, these 3 measures are strictly identical.
The MIDI files will be the same for the three measures. When you save a Midi file, you lose all
information concerning the graphic aspect of the score. Only the
data strictly necessary to play the score are recorded. For this reason, the writing and reading of
MIDI files is useful only when you must exchange files with
another software. You will also find MIDI files libraries in the
trade and on the Internet, and you can read them in Pizzicato. By default, when you open a MIDI file,
Pizzicato will first associate the notes in the tracks with each
staff of the document. Then it will automatically transcribe the
notes and display the score. If you do not want to automatically
transcribe a MIDI file into notes, use the Options menu,
Additional options... item and disable the corresponding
check box. In such a case, to see the notes in the measures, you
need to transcribe the tracks in musical notation: select all
measures and use the Transcribe item in the Edit menu. Three formats exist for a MIDI file. Format 0
contains only one track with all notes together. Format 1
contains one or more tracks grouping all notes of a staff. Format
2 is rather rare and contains several independent sequences.
Pizzicato reads and writes formats 0 and 1. Exporting a Midi file [Light] [Beginner] [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Choir] [Keyboard] [Soloist] Listen to it and observe the way in which notes are
graphically displayed. We will save it in a MIDI file. In the
following section, we will open the MIDI file to transform it
back into a score. Three choices lets you select between the full 0 format (with
the notes), the 0 format with only tempo information (quite
rare), or the full 1 format. The advised choice (and also the
default choice) is format 1. Click Export. Pizzicato
asks you a file name. Fill in Test and click Save.
Pizzicato saves the MIDI file and the export is finished. Starting with Pizzicato 3.5.3, you can select the staves that
are exported to the MIDI file, with the "J" checkbox
that you find in the instruments window. This checkbox specifies
which instrument is played and also exported in MIDI. Importing a Midi file [Beginner] [Professional] [Notation] [Composition Light] [Composition Pro] [Drums and Percussion] [Guitar] [Choir] [Keyboard] [Soloist] The four central options are only available in the more
advanced versions of Pizzicato. Here are the options: In this precise case, the main difference with the original
score is the way in which the beams and the stems of notes are
presented. This kind of information is not stored in a MIDI file
and Pizzicato simply recreates them from scratch. When you import a MIDI file and use the transcription,
Pizzicato takes into account the parameters contained in the
transcription options dialog box, exactly as explained in the
lesson about transcription. You can then save the result using
the Save item in the File menu. Remarks :