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Printing Music Manuscripts from MIDI
By Jon Miller

As previously mentioned, there are _many_ good programs out there
that will print music from MIDI files, ranging from poor to great,
from free or shareware to very expensive.

For those who are not familiar with MIDI files and printing them,
I just wanted to point out that it is not necessarily an easy job.
You probably are not going to be able to just download a ton of MIDI
files and be able to print them out in a useable/readable way.  More
often than not, the music was entered by someone who did not necessarily
do it in a manner consistent with standard notation conventions.

A piece originally written for piano, for instance, will have two
staves.  For a variety of reasons, the person entering the music into
a MIDI file may have used only one - or may three or four, or more.
Sometimes, the person entering the music will not use the same note
lengths as in the printed music - for instance, to get some "space"
between notes, a half note may be entered into the file as a quarter
note tied to an eighth note tied to a sixteenth note.

I have more often than not, after downloading a MIDI file and looking
at it, decided it was less work to just enter it myself than to try and
make the downloaded file "printable".

John Miller
Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA
www.PianoRollStuff.com


(Message sent Sat 4 Oct 2003, 17:11:45 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.)

Key Words in Subject:  Manuscripts, MIDI, Music, Printing

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