docs - midi, text, songs, and sounds

PianoCheetah only likes .song files.

mid2song


If you load a midi file, that thing will be turned into a .song file because midi files are way too hard for Steve to deal with !!!

You can open a .song file with a text editor. It's just text.

A song is actually a directory of stuff.
the directory is the song name
in the directory is an a.mid file - that's the source of your song
there's also an a.song file - that's what pianocheetah uses
if you want that song in wav format, you guessed it, a.wav
there can also be an a.txt file instead of the a.mid file
maybe you have a .pdf of the sheet music (to name a.pdf:)


I like to name my songs as group_rating_title where
group is the band, artist, etc
rating is a b or c.
title is the song title
no spaces cuz linux (use - or _ instead)

a=awesome (like and can listen to it over and over)

b=basic (like but only once, please)

c=crappy (but maybe the beat or chords are good)

Currently there is no known way to get the song back to midi. YET ! But there will be some day.


txt2song


PianoCheetah can also convert .txt => .song

I made it for when I only have sheet music - no midi.
It's so I can do the least amount of typing to get sheet music IN.

I'll document it some day (sorry).
There are examples in the pianocheetah/4_queue/_demo/txt dir


Song List dialog's toolbar


In here there are 4 icons that all look the same.
(sometimes computer programmers get lazy. Hover over them and the tooltips will tell them apart.)

The first one is...

MidiImport


The Search toolbar icon is for searching your big ole directory of midi files.
The results are put into a 4_queue/Found dir and converted to .song

But if you already have a directory of midi files picked out, then this is the toolbar icon you want.
pianocheetah will eat this dir - make sure it has a good dir name cuz that'll be it's name in 4_queue. (Too keep it organized).
a dir is made under 4_queue/dirname/midifilename for each midi file. And it's converted to .song format.
any non midi files are moved to a dir called _junk (like .txt files or .pdf or whatever else)


Song2Wav


Let's say you get a song just right. And you have a good recording.
And you wanna put it on your phone.
Pick a song in the list and click this guy.
That'll make an a.wav file in that directory.
You can put that on your phone and your music player can play it.

You may want to convert it to .mp3 - ffmpeg will do that for ya.

Oh! The song must be completely played with syn - no other synths !


Sfz2Syn


Syn comes with a pretty ok set of sounds.
I have to distribute these ones because they're in the public domain.
(Microsoft's Songsmith purchased an ARIA sound set from Garritan and put it into the public domain).

But there are some missing general midi "instruments" and some of the sounds could use a little improvement. (The piano - eh - not super perfect).

Pick a dir of .SFZ files with this guy.
And those sounds will be added to syn's sounds.
You can always delete a sound directory in the pianocheetah/device/syn/ dir.
there's a "soundset" directory on top of
"individual sound" directory on top of
a bunch of .WAV files for the different note ranges / velocity ranges of the sound


Mod2Song


If you know me you know I loved old computers.
We used to have .mod files also known as "soundtracker" files.
They contain samples and note info to play a techno-y song of some sort.
So I wrote a converter so pianocheetah could play them via syn.

It takes the 8 bit samples in the .mod file and adds them to a syn soundset.
Then converts the notes to a .song file.

If you haaaappen to have old .mod files around you may like this thingy.
For example... leave the brain !!!




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