Re: Midi files as choral music rehearsal tool

Hi Rufus,

I suggest you have a look at Harmony Assistant:
http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/harmony.htm

Harmony Assistant includes a "virtual singer" which can sing lyrics that
you add to your notation files. It can import notation from MIDI files.

It comes with a plugin that allows you to playback the scores
interactively in a web browser. It produces synthesised audio (with
lyrics!) and tracks the playback position in the notation.
Alternatively, you can use a "karaoke" view to see the lyrics instead of
the score.

I use Harmony Assistant for doing choral arrangements. I like the fact
that its very easy to generate parts for the singers to practice from.
You can synthesise an entire part with lyrics that can easily be put
onto a CD or MP3 player. I usually do one mix for each part, with the
main part on the right channel, and the other parts on the left channel.
That way, you can fade them in/out by just adjusting the stero balance.
Admittedly, it would be useful to be able to punch in/out individual
parts. That can be done in the application, but not in the plugin.

If you want to go down the programming route, I suggest you look at the
following APIs:
portmusic (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/portmusic/)
fluidsynth (http://www.fluidsynth.org/)
portmusic includes platform-independent libraries for real-time audio I/O (portaudio) and MIDI I/O (portmidi). These APIs are used in commercial as well as freeware applications and I believe are pretty well tested. fluidsynth is a portable soundfont-based MIDI synthesiser which you could use if you wanted to be independent of the MIDI support offered by the host OS. Another option would be to use Quicktime which includes a MIDI synthesiser and is portable between Windows and Mac.

For ideas and source code, you could try the music-dsp mailing list:
http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp/
and the associated source-code archive:
http://www.musicdsp.org/

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Stewart

Rufus V. Smith wrote:
I am a member in several choral groups and have used midi
files to rehearse my parts in many concerts.

The program I use to play is VanBasco's Karaoke at
www.VanBasco.com

I am a skilled programmer, so I have been writing my own
version because I want more control over the playback, including
cutting/pasting/notating ( add page/measure numbers) and
more dynamic punch-in and punch-out of parts (lead-ins etc)

So far I've been reading and displaying midi files, and sending
them out to the multimedia control (or whatever it's called, I
forget). I've been doing this in Visual Basic Express 2005.

(Stop Laughing... I also program in C, C++, Awk, Tcl/TK, C#, Pascal,
Etc, but Visual Basic is so much fun, and I figured there'd be
more simple libraries available)

However, I've not done any "real-time" midi capture or output.

Anybody know some good source code sites or discussion groups/mailing
lists?


Thanks.

Rufus

P.S. One approach I'm think of doing is a SMF file (.mid) to .CSV
and back converters. I think there are some on the net out there
too. Only I'd prefer ones that are source-available so I can modify
them to my purposes.






.

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