Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner I wish there was ....

a software program that would take music on CD and convert it to sheet music that I could simply print and play.

I'm not talking about difficult or complex works. Piano solos ... light jazz or new age pieces ... for which there's no sheet music available.

Is there a product out there that will do this? It's such a tedious time-consuming chore to do in the traditional old-fashioned way.

Thanks,
JP

Pat,

I guess that such a software program does not exist, and if it does, it would not be very helpful. There are several reasons:

1) a software can do a frequency analysis, but I guess due to the complex harmonic spectrum of even a single piano note it is highly non-trivial to map a spectrum back to a discrete set of notes.

2) a human player never plays "exactly" in the sense that the tempo varies and the length of single notes is never exactly their "official" length. Hence, it is not possibly to infer automatically whether something is supposed to be a quarter note, a sixteenth note, a staccato note etc. Similarly, it is probably not easy (or impossible) to infer the borderlines of bars.

For example, if you play on a Midi-Keyboard and attach the output of the keyboard to a computer, you don't have problem 1) mentioned above, but still the score that you can automatically generate by some programs is not really useful because it does not really reflect the "semantics" of the original score. This was my experience, at least.

To summarize: Good software (doing a spectrum analysis) might be some help in deciphering a piece on CD, but I think the wish to automatically create a good score from it is an illusion.

There is a little red guitar trainer made by Tascam.(I think it is less than $200) It somehow can slow down any CD but keep it on pitch so guitarists can duplicate their favorite guitar riffs etc. I imagine it could work for piano it you wanted to transcribe youself.

Although it doesn't work automatically, you can try Transcribe!, available here: Seventh String Software.

Klaus, Stanza & BDB,

Thanks for the help and advice. I'll check out these two applications.

Klaus, leave it to a software engineer to show me how my seemingly "simple little task" is not so simple after all.
BTW, Andreas had my action last week to do a little work. He brought it back this morning and spent the day regulating, tuning & voicing the piano. All I can say is and awesome. Thanks again for your recommendation!!!

Pat

Well, you can find a MIDI file of just about every song/riff/classical piece there is with Google. There are plenty of programs that can transpose MIDI's into sheet music; I personally prefer Noteworthy Composer.

There's a free plug in called Chronotron for free winamp that does just what Stanza said also! Much less than $200

It's not quite the problem described here, but a simple, albeit expensive, device does exist for recording the pitches played on any ordinary acoustic piano. It comprises a strip as long as the keyboard width, which fits over the rear of the keys. This is attached to an electronic recording device which stores every note played and when it was played. As SoftwareResearch rightly says, the notation of rhythm as an optimal approximation of what is meant is still a human task. Nonetheless, for recapturing complex improvisations on ordinary pianos this device would seemingly eliminate the tedium of getting all the pitches by ear.

It has a pretty hefty price - around NZ$2000, so I'd have to know I would get a lot of use out of it before I'd buy it. I gather it can feed a file to music software on a computer. The rhythmic problems, however, remain.