midi2chord

What can I do with midi2chord?

Have you ever searched a tool, which easily parses your standard midi-file (SMF0/1) and tries to find many chords? Also you need no graphical user interface (GUI) or a huge programm, that mostly wastes disk space? Or do you have to analyze often music data by hand for harmonic info? Maybe you have now found a tool that can help you to make your live a little bit easier...

midichord provides a lot of options which makes it easy to fit the desired output to your needs:

• print chords only at positions which are on a definable raster with a definable range (useful for handplayed midi-files)
• choose different detection algorithms
• exclude some tracks from analysis (e.g. the rhythm track)

What is a chord?

A chord is a compact symbol for harmonic musical information at a single position of a harmonic-music data (which could be a midi-file (see this project), but also a audio-file (which is not provided by this project)). More technically spoken it is a symbol for a set of notes (tone-frequencies) which are played (sounding) together.

Musicians can play together without having notes, by using more or less implicitely chords. This is often used in improvisation (which mainly jazz makes heavy usage).

What is a standard MIDI-file SMF?

MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. It is a standardized interface to allow the communication of electronic musical instruments to each other (such as keyboard or computer). A midi-file is midi-data enclosed in a standardized file-format. There are different formats (currently 0-2). Note that midi2chord currently supports only SMF0 or SMF1 midi-files!

What do I need to use midi2chord?

To use midichord you must have following things:

• perl
• "MIDI" perl-modul
• of course a actual midi2chord package ;-)

Can midi2chord parse other music-data such as audio or my music-sequencer output?

No. This is not the purpose of this tool - others could do this much better! Try to transform your data into a standard midi-file (SMF) in the format 0 or 1 with your sequencer or a other tool which may exist. Then you are able to feed it to midi2chord.

Can you explain the installation of midi2chord?

Since this information is more actual in the current package you can download, it is therefore recommended to read the file "README" there. But generally spoken you first have to check that all required things for midi2chord are installed on your system. Then simply uncompress the current release and read the instructions as noted above. Since this is a small tool, it is normally no big problem. If so, feel free to use the support-functions for this project at sourceforge.

Why has midi2chord been started?

As often in software-projects this project has been started for personal needs of such a tool (here it is the project-administrator). Please feel free to contact the system-administrator if you own a similar project - perhaps for future work together.

Can I help to improve midi2chord?

Yes, shure! All kinds of improvements are wellcome - regardless whether you found a bug, you wish a new feature or you want to be a developer of midi2chord. Simply contact the project administrator!

Can you tell me some basic ideas/plans about midi2chord, which could also describe the future course?

Yes, I want in short to keep the main ideas very straight ahead:

• of course release bug fixes
• improvements of chord recognition
• new features will be added only if it is useful for determine and printing chords and a other tool can not do this special feature much better and easier (simply this is a subject we have learned by the unix-gurus: keep it simple stupid).