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midi import very long or unusable

Posted

When i try to import midi files the import and recognition is very long (minutes) or even don't finish after 15mn or so for some (simple) midifiles.


Sat, 2020-01-25 - 20:17 Permalink

The duration of the file is not a factor. The number of polyphonic rhythms is. It raises the combinatorial possibilities of figure segmentation, sometimes in the billions.

There's often a lot of repetition in MIDI files. I recommend loading them as static pitches (very fast), then extracting the interesting parts and doing figure recognition on them individually ((https://users.cognitone.com/tutorial/import))

Mon, 2020-01-27 - 19:54 Permalink

Since DAWs work fine with static notes, import is often confused with some form of file/open.

MIDI just can't do that for Synfire. Don't expect to open a MIDI file, edit it with synfire and save it as MIDI again. MIDI is a very old, lossy and simple format. Synfire requires a lot of metadata that MIDI can't represent. MIDI files are mainly a medium you can harvest for raw material (libraries).

There is no portable file format out there that would preserve enough of Synfire's metadata to make it a useful data exchange format.