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RELEASED Simpsons, Madagascar, Megaman2 titles (and others) show why piano sheet music is the best source.

Discussion in 'Musical Instruments' started by ollj, Dec 20, 2013.

  1. ollj

    ollj Big Damn Hero

    So far each post here has its own archive of abc/midi songs on its bottom.

    For now you can just get my backup of over 230 nicely sorted songs, my whole folder (91mb uncompressed) (with 230 midis, minus pdf and image sources, cause they are harder to zip and .tif files are huge)

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    tldr: Piano sheet music is clearer and better for single starbound instruments than midi versions of the same song that are arranged for multiple different instruments.

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    Megaman2title is a good example here because it has slow and fast parts. Instruments that are not piano scan have trouble with other versions of those.
    Simpsons-Title and Madagascar2-title are very tricky orchestral songs that I found piano-sheet music from. And they sound clear enough for single starbound instruments.
    even though they fail to play connected notes.
    Other midi versions of these songs just sound awful in starbound, because they are arranged for multiple and different instruments not meant to be played as such on a single instrument.


    Midi players have no problem whatsoever playing the same note multiple times at the same moment by one or multiple instruments.
    abc files can play the same note only once at any moment. and merging instruments makes this even messier.
    Therefore piano-sheet music files, that arrange a song to be played with 2 or 4 hands on a piano, are generally a much better choice for .abc files.
    Piano sheet music often utilizes different octave-ranges/hands to clearly distinguish separate tracks.
    You usually can tell that a midi file has piano-sheet music as its origin if it only had 2 instruments and both of them are pianos,
    with one midi piano for each hand with their own octave ranges.

    Multi-instrument midis can sound very fancy. The doom soundtrack being an extreme example. but LotrO and starbound instruments are much more limited.
    In starbound additional minor notes, baselines and upper tones from midis just cause more noise and server lag and timing going bad by micro stuttering
    while sheet music is clearer to a basic melody.
    megaman2title-SHEET.abc sounds good with any instrument
    while the midi. arrangements just have too many tracks fighting over the same octave ranges, making it sound messy on single instruments.
    The overdrive-guitar of starbound makes all the difference between the megaman2 title.abc files.

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    Sharpeye2 can convert .tif images of music sheets into midis. Just scale the image up if its too small for it to recognize the lines as such.
    It usually doesn't matter how blurry the sheet music image becomes unless its not JPEG-compressed to hell. It just can't deal with small images.
    To make out-of-rythm-grey-highlighted notes normal-black, go to options, rhythm analysis options and tell it to "go fuck yourself and any sheet music rhythm"
    because you just want to have all the notes in the midi regardless of conventional sheet music restrictions.

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    anyone post links to a sheet music image or .pdf you wish to be converted to .midi and .abc .

    I will post more songs to illustrate certain problems with starbound abc notation:
     

    Attached Files:

    Last edited: Dec 23, 2013
  2. ollj

    ollj Big Damn Hero

    2 big limitations for starbound are:

    - No changing tones, glissando or other ornaments/in-between notes.

    - Limited useful octave range for a few instruments.

    Basically starbound Instruments are not a themerin no matter how good the sheet music is.

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    The Diva Dance - The 5th Element demonstrates crazy and smooth jumps in tempo and octave for the Starbound Microphone instruments like no other melody.
    - movie clip (skip to 3:23)
    - full unedited version (skip to 3:33)
    - Sung for real

    - sheet music that is not even very accurate
    - ...converted to midi and .abc dares to use the microphone instrument.
     

    Attached Files:

    Last edited: Dec 23, 2013
  3. ollj

    ollj Big Damn Hero

    Echos and overlapping notes/octaves:

    - Tried to emulate stereo echo on a single instruments by adding upper-tones in other octaves to make non-echo-parts sound louder. But either resulting overlap of notes or the too loud echo sound bad in starbound.

    Lemmings 2 , Cavelem;

    lemmings 2 cavelem has a low frequency Xylophone and a low frequency Flute/Oboe, playing a rhythmic melody in a cave with a lot of high frequency echo. The Amiga was always good in having low frequencies on the left channel and high frequencies on the right channel because its hardware was great in producing stereo sound and this allowed people to use one channel as a base, a good setup to have a stereo effect of an echo. I wanted tried translate this to a single mono instrument for a challenge...

    All the echo and upper-tones made this hard to convert into a single-unstrument track, because a single instrument can not play the same note twice to make the echo not too loud. but I have to add upper-tones and shift octaves to distinguish instruments that would otherwise just overlap and be in the wrong pitch.
    The result is an .abc file that sounds best on the worst instruments and worst on the best instruments,that usually sound good with any song.
    While the second midi sounds good (midis being able to play the same note at the same moment many times) , the instruments of starbound make it a lot worse. Strangely the instruments that you usually avoid make it sound much better.
     

    Attached Files:

  4. ollj

    ollj Big Damn Hero

  5. ollj

    ollj Big Damn Hero

    Way too many awesome sheet music files with separated vocal track (and even lyrics)

    Only Time & I Will Survive are just the first 2 of WAY too many smoochy songs that I could convert into a midi with separated vocal track. These all sound great and these 2 songs are just perfect for Florans while they work in small groups on any instrument.

    --

    now having more (potential) songs than i could ever play,
    I am looking for a musical server and some assistance
     

    Attached Files:

  6. ollj

    ollj Big Damn Hero

    Some more piano sheets converted:

    - Galaxy Quest Theme
    - Guild Wars 2 Theme
    - Happy Together - Turtles
    - Pokemon Center
    - Skyrim Title (and other Skyrim piano tracks)
    - What a Feeling - Flashdance
    - White Album - [Visual novel anime, and NOT a Beatles-song] (violin melody)
     

    Attached Files:

  7. ollj

    ollj Big Damn Hero

    And it gets better... (piano versions, most of them have a separate track only for vocals):
    These [separated vocals] are awesome. They all have 3 tracks. 2 piano hands and a vocal track. All of them work well with any instrument, most of them also quantized:

    - Plants VS Zombies - 8 songs.
    - Ice Ice Baby - Vanilla Ice
    - A Caleidoscope Of Mathemathics (Beautiful Mind ost)

    - The Call - Regina Spektor (Narnia Theme) (the right piano hand is basically just the vocals)
    - Hit The Road Jack - Ray Charles (separated vocals)
    - We Are All Made Of Stars - Moby (separated vocals)
    - In This World - Moby (separated vocals)
    - I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor (separated vocals)
    - Snakes On A Plane - Cobra Starship (separated vocals)
    - Stayin Alive - Bee Gees (separated vocals)
    - Time Of Your Life - Green Day (simplified) (separated vocals)

    And one loop for all the times a creature jumps into lava. I sunk too much time in to get its timing right.
    - We Interrupt This Program - Coburn (2 NEDM loops)
     

    Attached Files:

    Last edited: Dec 23, 2013
  8. ollj

    ollj Big Damn Hero

    Green Greens - Kirby's Dream Land shows a huge difference between me searching for an mp3 to convert it to abc (bad version) and me searching for piano sheet music to turn it into an abc after adjusting octave ranges (good versions, still with minor compromises).

    Main problem is that the lotro instruments have a limited octave range and the lotro converter wraps notes within that limit. The upper tones of that song are 2,5 octaves higher than its baseline, to much. Lowering them 1 octave makes some notes overlap, still sounds best. not lowering them wraps the lowest notes of the baseline, still fine.

    Using a nicely sounding midi results in a bad conversion no matter what, because that one has the uppertones 4 octaves higher warping a lot of notes inside a limited octave range.
     

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