Matt is right about the new Melodyne technology. It is awesome. It tears chords apart and lets you play with them and convert the polyphonic recording to MIDI if you want. Getting Melodyne to take a polyphonic recording of ONE instrument and convert to MIDI is one thing, taking a recording of multiple instruments and doing the same thing is problematic at best.

Melodyne's latest technology is called Direct Note Access (DNA). DNA makes Melodyne polyphonic so that it can identify separate notes and place them as "blobs" on its timeline. The technology works pretty well if you have a recording of a single instrument that is playing chords. It attempts to identify the separate notes that make up the chord and places them on the timeline. Even in this most ideal situation of an audio recording of a single instrument it isn't 100% accurate and the software guesses at some notes. You as the user have to go in and verify the guesses and other wise help the software out to get the best results. After you have it verified, you can convert the audio to MIDI. The program is great as an audio program for correcting missed notes and out of tune instruments. You can even change the key from major to minor, or change the key up or down for the whole performance.

The notion that this is a multi-track or multi instrument program is probably true in the strictest sense of the word but believe me, unless there is some version of Melodyne that I haven’t used with some new multi-track technology, getting it to efficiently split out the individual instruments for you is going to be no easy task if you can do it at all. Melodyne can identify individual notes in an audio recording but if it identifies a middle C, it can't tell you if that middle C is being played by a guitar, a piano, a trombone, or a percussive instrument tuned to that note. So the software is going to give you that entire jumble of notes and you are pretty much going to have to tell Melodyne what the significance of each note is. The only way that I could see to do it would be to select one instrument at a time and delete every note that it didn't play, leaving only that instrument standing, then convert that to MIDI. Then you would have to do the same for every individual instrument. Sounds like quite a task to me. I’ve read several posts on the forum in the past that people believe that it can be done, but I don’t think I’ve read a single post where someone said that he or she has actually done it.

Audio-to-MIDI with software instruments or with direct MIDI output is only available in Melodyne studio which is by far the most expensive flavor of Melodyne. In Melodyne editor and Melodyne assistant, audio notes can be converted to MIDI and saved as a Standard MIDI File. This Standard MIDI File can be imported to a MIDI track in your DAW to make it trigger a hardware or software instrument. The most basic version of Melodyne, Melodyne Essentials, has no MIDI capabilities at all. Of the entire line , only Melodyne Editor has the the DNA technology.

A little time spent googling will yield prices signifantly lower than buying direct from Celemony.


Keith
2026 Audiophile Windows 11 RYZEN THREADRIPPER 3960X 4.5GHZ 128 GB RAM 2 Nvidia RTX 3090s, Vegas,Acid,SoundForge,Izotope Production,Melodyne Studio,SONAR,3 Raven Mtis