I like the idea of being able to convert any audio track into its equivalent piano version.
Do we have the technology to do this or is it even possible?
Not in the way you’re thinking of, but I do recall having seen an audio to MIDI program that takes an mp3 and builds a midi file based off the sound waves. It sounded exactly as bad as you’d expect.
That said, I’ve been really impressed with lalalai or whatever it’s called; it can pull any instrument track out of a song individually
I wonder if an audio to midi program would be more effective on that?
There’s still one I’d have to go and look it up because I use it myself from time to time. It’s standalone and it works best with single instrument tracks.
However, you can use free openvino audacity plugins to strip a song into its individual tracks and then use other programs to convert those tracks to MIDI and then import them into a midi editor and then recompose them as needed.
It for now is incredibly janky and is an awful lot of work and is not clear and straightforward at all but it is feasible, and I say feasible very slowly and methodically to communicate that it’s feasible in the way that you could feasibly build your own house on unclaimed land without spending a dime just using stone tools that you made yourself and wood that you personally harvested from fallen trees.
As others have alluded, MIDI data is the key to what you want. MIDI is essentially sheet music for computers, so you feed a virtual instrument that MIDI file, and it plays it for you. Most software even refers to the visualized MIDI data as the “piano roll.”
You can see the little piano keys represented here, and the notes that will be played as the file is played through the selected instrument. There are numerous virtual representations of all kinds of piano.
The problem is making any kind of transcriptions of copy written songs is a legal grey area, and many sheet music and guitar tab sites get shut down.
The programs the others are discussing, turning mp3 straight to midi have issues because it’s lumping the data for all the instruments (likely more than you realize, sometimes dozens per song when things are layered to sound bigger) into a single feed. All those instruments interplay with each other differently harmonically, and are played with different techniques. A piano is played differently than an organ, let alone something like a trumpet, so the software doesn’t know how to filter what is trying to be created artistically.
So you can do it and it’s relatively straightforward, but not something you’re going to do on the fly is in a legal grey area.
I can go into any of this more if you want deeper explanations.
Oh wow. That takes me back. There used to be a Windows 3.1 program that would attempt to make MIDIs from MP3s. It worked best with soft and quiet songs, not overly loud ones.
If you want a particular song transcribed, it might be best to find someone to help.
Again, shoutout to !musicproduction@sh.itjust.works
Lots of good answers here already. If you elaborate a bit on what specifically you want it would help.
Udio lets you upload tracks and then remix them. What I have seen of it on YouTube seems like it might be able to do this, but I’m not certain. This is currently a paid feature though.
Can I introduce you to the talking piano?
Yes. Yes you may
