Hi Folks!

There are way too many options, switches, settings, and methods for either BIAB or RB for me to figure this out for myself. Even searching the forums returns so much data I can't sift through it all.

I thought that what I want to do is pretty simple, but maybe not. For the music I work with, I can get rehearsal printed band leadsheets (Finale chord notation with melody and lyrics) and an MP3, but not a MIDI file. What I want to do is adlib along with the MP3 and record my MIDI output to create music notation. The notation produced could be its own printed output, or somehow shown along with a leadsheet printout.

There appear to be many ways to try and import or convert an MP3 to MIDI that will generate chord notation, but the output is often radically different than the printed rehearsal leadsheet - and of course the melody line isn't shown. This means I end up editing the converted output to the point that it takes almost as long as just entering it from scratch, copying from my rehearsal printout. For some reason, the resulting audio and notation don't seem to match up during playback - like the chord changes occuring on the display are out of sync with what you hear in the audio. Furthermore, when I try to put the Real Band created output (from MP3 to MIDI conversion) in BIAB lots of the chords I had entered/edited disappear.

Maybe I'm going about this the hard way, and it would be simpler to just listen to the MP3 while recording a MIDI solo track. However, I don't understand how this will translate to printed music with the correct time sig/beat/note/measure notation. I also want to be able to work on (edit) specific passages and try different things until I get the phrase I want to use as part of the final recording and printed sheet music.

I originally tried getting the rehearsal Finale docs and opening them with Songwriter thinking that I could do something with the MIDI and melody lines from it, but that doesn't work because Songwriter won't open Finale files. Can somebody provide some guidance on the best way to solve my problem? I'm running BIAB 2009.5, along with RB and the other bits and pieces you get for around $100. In addition, I have Cubase LE. I have an AKAI EWI4000S wind controller, a couple of soundbanks (Yamaha VL-70M & Roland XV-2020), a small mixer (UB802), and a Zoom H4.