PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Audio Chord Wizard Upgrade/Fix ?

Hey Wrkit

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My, what a snarky reply. etc

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Yup . . . you're right.
Every now and then we get someone like yourself who bursts out of the hinterland with their
9mms leveled at a good product that doesn't bend to their whims, psyche,
or self-perceived grandiose opinions of themselves and their technological
abilities.

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...snarky...

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Exactly what I read in your first words.
Criticism is easy, "dude" . . . oh yeh and lose the edge.

Who's "Hugh"? . . . Besides Hef.

Ian

Huge ...me?

Only when wearing bi vocals. Note sp correction. My specs make my...never mind.

Band in a forum wants musical tewms only, I guess bi vocals are duets.

Wrkit,

What version of BIAB do you have? ACW has changed a bit over the years.

Regards,
Noel

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I'm Just seeking insights into ACW and what others think and feel about it

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As a casual BIAB user and reader of this forum ... I think it works pretty darn good.

The ACW also does a good job putting a BIAB rhythm to a live recorded audio cut.
Thus helping BIAB and you add backing tracks to a live track with an uneven rhythm.

Ian

Wow, how insightful? What's that old adage...if you don't have anything
useful to contribute to the discussion....

Peace out & many bright moments!

Wrkinit

Finally! A Breakthrough!

The following link was on the Yahoo users group forum.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Band-in-a-Box/message/42663
Message: #42663 of 42673

It addresses a revelation for those of us trying to make lemon aid
from a lemon.

Wrkinit

Not a breakthrough at all.I've been doing this for some time on songs that have difficulty. Your issue though was ranting that it didn't work right doing a process it was never intended to do.

Wrkit, I've been reading this thread again. Lets start over because this may simply be a misunderstanding of terms. You first refered to using the ACW as an audio to midi converter. It doesn't do that and this Yahoo group post doesn't change that. The ACW is primarily used for two things:

1. You're not a very good musician, you can barely count on your fingers and toes so you put in a favorite song you simply want to play yourself. It will give you more or less the layout and chord changes so you can figure out the rest of it. That function has nothing to do with Biab, converting anything to midi, none of that.

2. Here's where there might be a misunderstanding. If you send the ACW info to Biab all it's doing is populating the chord grid with what it thinks are the chords. If you were to take a pic of the chord grid with your camera, then click on file>new in Biab and then looking at the pic, manually enter those same chords into a new blank chord grid, what do you have? A brand new Biab song waiting for you to pick a style, set the part markers, etc. There's no audio to midi conversion happening. It's just the chords on the chord grid.

That's all this is. The ACW gives you the chords to a new Biab song so if your original audio song is a 6/8 jazz swing, you can then take the same song and use a country rock 4/4 shuffle or something. That's it. Conversly the ACW also puts the original audio file on the audio track inside Biab so you can find a style that fit's the original audio file and then generate some Biab parts to go along with it. If you don't want to play along with the original audio file you mute or delete it. Biab is not using the notes the ACW detected to somehow create or choose a style or anything. You simply pick any style you want as usual and Biab generates the parts. Again, nothing to do with audio to midi conversion or random chord generating. Now, I will admit sometimes it may sound or look like random chords because it didn't do a good job of detecting. There's already a bunch of tricks mentioned here to help with that including slowing down the tempo like that Yahoo post suggested.

If you're a good player with good ears then the ACW doesn't do much for you and that's why I don't use it much either. For me if there's some complicated song I want to put into Biab, I can usually find a midi file of it and it's all there. Biab and RB both do a pretty good job of detecting the chords from a midi file and usually the melody is there too so all you do is look at the lead sheet and it's already written out for you. The procedure with Biab is similar but much faster when you have a midi file of your song. Biab takes the midi and like the ACW, will detect the chords from it and put them on the chord grid. There's always a few you need to change but that's basically it.

Hope this clears this up a bit.

Bob

Sometimes i get results from the ACW that seem random. Changing the 'sensitivity' often corrects this.

Go to 'analysis,' then 'audio beat detection sensitivity.' Try it both ways. Might help.

Man! Probably the last response Wreckit will ever get from this group!

And BTW, ACW works great for me for what it is intended to do. Give you a great START to a BIAB song. I have run dozens of mp3's through it and with some cleanup have a good chord progression. I know I have saved many many hours using this tool.

Thanks guys for clearing this up. I was under the impression, and from what I thought the ACW did, was to *recognize* the actual chords of the wav or audio file. As Bob stated. it doesn't "quite" do that, but basically does more of a chordal layout, if you will. I get it. Maybe with the references used to describe the ACW is what misled me? When I imported the ACW results into BIAB and kept the audio file (instead of deleting it) as it played back, what I heard and what BIAB/ACW showed, seemingly, didn't match up. The suggestion of slowing down the Audio file made sense to allow for better sensitivity or recognition of sorts. I guess the other "audio to midi" programs mentioned do more of a *monotone* conversion of audio to midi, which I mistook the ACW for being capable of. My impression was that the ACW was more advanced to include poly-tonal recognition. This is what I was referencing. Possibly, one day the technology will be able to do that, but at the present time, I see it's not there yet....Years ago, when I thought of why can't they just use some form of a digital audio spectrum analyzer and convert that info into some form of digital representation that could mirror the analog signals, then again, with overtone frequencies and harmonics, that might be a tad more complicated to do....maybe?

Anyway, I do appreciate the informative responses to the subject matter and hopefully we can all get along. BTW, the song I used was an old Bill Withers tune called, "Can We Pretend." Now if only I could get the sheet music for this unattainable little song...sigh!

Wrkinit

You still don't get it. The ACW will give you a layout of all the chords in the song so then you can add RTs, RDs or midi parts. It also generates a tempo map.The parts you add will play along perfectly with the original audio file.I've done this many, many times. I produced a commercial CD for a band recently and used the ACW to add RTs after the fact. Here's a link to the CD.Tell me which tunes I doctored up using the ACW.
Twelve Gauge Persuaders

What I do get is the non-informative response of yours. What's that saying, "If you don't have
anything of value to contribute....

Wrkit

Then again maybe not! Thanks for ?!? Geez, another non-entity!
Gimme a break! I hope your music doesn't reflect who you are?
I'll stop responding to these jive ass responses and spend my
time making music instead of discourse? That's the ticket!

Bright Moments!
Wrkinit

Let's see you have 62 posts and I have 6000. My info can't be all that jive ass. suit yourself man.

Just when it looked like it was safe to jump back in the water...

Wrkit, we're not there with you so trying to explain things on a forum can get tricky. It's very easy to talk past each other because we don't really know exactly what you're doing. Silvertones is right but the ACW certainly is a bit tough to get used to. Have you found the video that Rharv produced about it? I don't have the link handy but it's around here somewhere.

I can tell from some of your posts you're cool, just don't be so quick to jump to conclusions,'k? I know if we were all sitting around having a few brewski's and talking about this with a laptop we'd work this out quickly.

Bob

John,

I almost hate to reply in this thread given the original thought trend by wrkit. But I'm curious as to your statement about "MIDI is dying" and if your main opinion driver is Windows? Here, I'd have to disagree with you, primarily because:

Most users I know and/or read threads on other music forums (Cakewalk/SONAR, Yamaha, Roland, Notion, Guitar Pro, etc.,) don't rely on Windows for MIDI processing (meaning midi-mapper or in/out). In fact, Windows isn't a consideration, given that many (if not most) use a hardware audio and/or MIDI interface and drivers for DAW and basic recording. Additionally, besides keyboard, there are (while fewer in number than keyboard players) who own and use other synth instruments, such as guitar, wind, electronic drums (also recall Peter's recent request for MIDI features).

Sorry for replying in this thread, but I think you are off the mark here.

Richard