Notes in MIDI file scrambled although displayed normally in Anvil Studio

• Jul 27, 2014 - 23:54

Hi everyone

I have a piano MIDI file that, when opened in MS, has all notes mixed up and therefore is impossible to work with (see attachment). On the other hand, that same file, when opened in Anvil Studio, looks fine, i.e. the note durations are as expected (see attachment screenshot)

I need to make some edits to this MIDI file, but doing them in Anvil Studio is really awkward. Is there a different way of opening the file in MS that would give me the correct staves?

Thanks!

Attachment	Size
anvil.jpg	451.97 KB
ms.jpg	507.36 KB

Comments

Marc Sabatella

• Jul 28, 2014 - 03:46

I assume that MIDI is of a live performance and is not that rhythmically accurate, and that is why MuseScore is displaying it the way it is. You could use Anvil or some other program to quantoze it and then it would look nicer in MuseScore. You could also be sure to set the "shortest note on import" option more appropriate - eighth or sixteenth, no shorter - upon importing the file. You could also try a Nightly build of 2.0 which is a lot more sophisticated in how it handles unquantized input like this presumably is, also better at assigning notes to staves.

longtalker

• Jul 28, 2014 - 10:00

Thanks Marc! I'm not sure about the origin of the MIDI but I'd guess it is created from someone's playing the keyboard as opposed to music created electronically, i.e. with exact durations.

Opening it in MS with 1/8 shortest note as opposed to the 1/64 default did help clean up the staves a bit. So did the quantize command in Anvil.

However, this particular piano piece could be learned much more easily if instead of the syncopated repetitions of the (same) chord in the left hand, I could just merge all identical & consecutive chords into a single chord, of a duration equal to the sum of all those different chords. Is there any way to do this in MS or in Anvil? So just to be clear, what I mean is that if in the LH there is a C major chord played once as 1/8, then as two 1/16s, all of this should be replaced with a single chord using quarter notes.

Thanks again for your help!