G'day Baz and other Noteworthy users,
I've reconstructed your test.mid and looked inside it. It seems that Noteworthy puts a gap (i.e. a rest) in between each note. Thus the short piece in question has notes with a duration of 5/6 of a beat plus a rest of 1/6 of a beat. My sequencer (Musicator) rounds that to 3/4 and 1/4 (the closest expected note lengths, at least for this time signature) and shows the notes as dotted quavers plus a semiquaver rest. (ENGLISH terminology, I'm not sure how to say that in American!). If you want to email me your original MIDI file I can confirm this. Send to alan.foster@tpgi.com.au

MID2txt rounds off the note lengths the same way. One way around this might be to modify MID2txt to ignore the "note off" MIDI signal and just turn off each note when the next note starts. We'd lose other rests too, but I suppose that won't matter much with song tunes. Another way would be to reduce the resolution to quavers instead of semiquavers, but then we'd lose notes in some tunes. This paragraph only applies to the ABC part of the program - the MIDI part faithfully reproduces the original MIDI file with exact timing and expression.

Dan, I presume you are taking the tunes as posted in this forum as input to Noteworthy. Are you using the MIDI part or the ABC part? The MIDI file you get should be identical to the one the original contributer posted. How does it work with Windows media player?

Joe, in another thread you said that the ABC output needed some cleaning up. Can you give me more details?

Jon & Joe, How could you suggest I'd be mean to my students? Would I do that? They're more likely to torture me! If you're a student work hard, get your assignments in on time and save some time for Mudcat!

A bit of background: I (and some of my musical friends) have a considerable hardware and software commitment to MIDI. Therefore I may be biased, but MIDI is able to convey exact timing and expression much better than ABC (and other details I've purposely left out of MIDItext in the interest of simplicity and brevity). ABC is a good way to share tunes in a text only forum and there are programs to convert between ABC and MIDI. The problem with these programs is that they don't always seem to work reliably, particulary with pickup bars (American term!). Having had a go at it myself I can see the difficulties involved in writing these conversion programs - hence this thread! By including MIDI and ABC in the MID2txt output I'm trying to encourage people to use one or the other and avoid a proliferation of different methods. I believe MIDI is the best way to share tunes if you can, otherwise use ABC. By the way all the bugs, imperfections etc. in MID2txt come from the ABC conversion code. The MIDI conversion seems to work fine - the MIDI file you get should be identical to the original file submitted.

Has Max solved the problem of sharing MIDI? Converting MIDI to text and back again was always a round about way of doing the job. If we can upload MIDI directly it will be much easier.

If we are going to use Max's method do we now need more reliable ways of converting between MIDI and ABC or are the avilable programs OK? Last time I looked they left something to be desired.

Cheers,
Alan