Downloading and using MIDI files and MidiNotate

To download a MIDI file, right click on its link on the MIDI file page. You will be shown a menu which includes an option such as Save Link As... or Save Target As.... Click on this option and you will be offered the opportunity to choose a name for the downloaded file and a folder in which to store it on your computer. After making these choices, click on Save.

To install MidiNotate on your computer you need to download a file called MidiNotS.exe. Do this by right clicking the MidiNotate link on the MIDI file page and following the same procedure as for downloading a MIDI file. After downloading, go to the folder where you have stored MidiNotS.exe and double click on this file. You will then be guided through the installation process. When installation is complete, there should be a yellow MidiNotate icon on your desktop and you should click on this icon to start the MidiNotate program. If the icon is not there, you can start MidiNotate by going to the Start menu, clicking on Run and entering midinote.exe.

Note that the version of MidiNotate which we have (which is an early test version) is free but occasionally at startup it will encourage you to find out about registering or buying it. If this happens, just click on the Tell me later option. If you want to buy the latest corrected full version of the software (which is now called Musician), go to http://www.notation.com/midinotate.htm - it costs US$49.95. An alternative program is Harmony Assistant http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/melody.htm which costs US$20.

Once you have installed and started MidiNotate, you can use it to open and play MIDI files which you have downloaded. The program has an online Help facility, but the following points should be enough to get you started.

• Once you have opened a MIDI file, play can be started by clicking the triangular play button at the top left of the screen or by pressing the Spacebar. Click or press again to stop playing.
• The playback marker (a green arrow just above the top stave) indicates where play will start. You can change its position by moving the cursor to the required point in the score (using the Page Down and Page Up keys if necessary) and clicking there.
• Each voice part has a number of buttons to the left of it. If you click the one marked with a smiley face then that voice part alone will be played. If you want to play a selection of voice parts, click on the buttons marked with disks so that the voices to be played have light disks and the ones not to be played have dark disks.
• The speed of playing can be increased or decreased by increasing or decreasing the "%" value next to the play button.

See below for some comments on the following topics.

• The problem of stuck notes
• Shortening long rests
• Tempo and dynamics
• Changing the relative volume of your part
• Changing instruments
• Problems with display

Stuck notes in MidiNotate

If you start a playback somewhere in the middle of a MIDI file, you may find that some notes continue to sound after they should have stopped. This is called a stuck note and it is covered in the online Help. The way to avoid stuck notes is to press CTRL-S (i.e. the CTRL and S keys simultaneously) immediately after you start the playback. This will prevent stuck notes from occurring until you stop the playback, but you will have to press CTRL-S again (and hold it down for a second or two) the next time you start playing. When starting anywhere other than the beginning of a file, it is best to start a bar or two earlier than you really want so that you can get the CTRL-S out of the way first.

Shortening of rests

Long rests are a problem for people who use one of the standard media-players which don't offer the ability to jump from one point in the score to another - you don't want to waste time listening to 20 bars of silence. For this reason, rests of more than about 4 bars in our single-part files are usually cut to about 4 bars. In all-part files, long rests applying to all parts are also likely to be shortened but this may still leave long rests in some individual voice parts.

Tempo and dynamics

Our MIDI files don't aim to give an accurate impression of how the work will sound in performance. They are intended to help you learn the notes by giving you the pitch of notes and their relative duration. We try to set a reasonably appropriate tempo overall but we don't generally implement pauses and rits and other short term variations of tempo which can be very confusing if you don't have a conductor to watch.

Changing the relative volume of your part

In theory there are two methods to make your voice part louder than the other parts, but in my experience only one of them works.

The method which definitely works is as follows. Go to the buttons at the left of your part and "select" your part by clicking on the arrow button (this is in addition to having the light disk showing on the disk button). Your part will be highlighted by a wishy-washy pale blue background. Then click on the volume slider (it is in the toolbar at the top of the screen, just below the words Perform and Setup) and keep the mouse button held down while you drag the slider to the right. The further you drag it, the louder your part will be relative to the other parts. You can move the slider while you are listening to playback so that you get exactly the balance that you want. You can also select more parts (by clicking their arrow buttons while holding down the Shift key) if you want to emphasize more than one part. Unfortunately all selections get cancelled whenever you move the playback marker to a new starting point, so you will have to keep re-clicking your arrow button(s).

The other method has the theoretical advantage that you should be able make your changes permanent and save them for later occasions. It involves going to the Track menu and clicking on Track Setup. This opens a big window with all the tracks listed along with various properties for each track. You can go into the Vol column and change the numbers there (the maximum number allowed is 127). In my experience this doesn't work - maybe it works in more recent versions of MidiNotate.

Changing instruments

If you don't like the instrument assigned to your part, you can change it by going into the Track menu and clicking on Track Setup and then on the instrument in the Patch column opposite your voice part. At the bottom of the window there will appear a list of 128 "instruments" including Helicopter and Gunshot (which is rather charming - try it!) and you can click on whichever you want - but be warned that Choir Aahs and Voice Oohs sound awful (though Voice Synth is not too bad) and Piano is not suitable because it does not sustain its volume through notes in the way that your voice should. If you want to make your changes permanent, click on Save in the File menu. This will save the file in MidiNotate's own NoteSoft format as a file with extension .not instead of .mid. The next time you want to play this piece, open the .not file instead of the .mid file and your changes should still be there.

Problems with display in MidiNotate

MidiNotate will usually produce the correct sounds, but its screen display is often confusing or plain wrong. All the problems with displays can be circumvented by LOOKING AT YOUR PRINTED SCORE while LISTENING TO MIDINOTATE and that is what you should do. However, if you want to know more about what the display problems are and why they occur, here are some brief notes.

• MidiNotate will often show the wrong duration for a note. When a long note is tied to a short note across a barline, the short note is often replaced by a rest in the display (though not in the playback sound). When a short note is followed by a rest, the displayed note will often be lengthened into the rest. This is partly due to bugs in MidiNotate (the free version we have is free because it was a test version not fully debugged) but is also due to the inherently primitive nature of MIDI files. A MIDI file does not contain instructions which say `play an A sharp crotchet'. It says `at time 29:1:0, start playing pitch number 56 and continue for 240 ticks of your clock'. In turning this into a display in standard musical notation, any MIDI-playing software has to make a lot of guesses and interpretations. Even the most expensive software cannot always produce the display which was intended by the creator of the file. And if the file has been created by someone playing on a musical keyboard (rather than entering instructions in musical notation), the duration of the notes will never be exactly what the music specifies and the display will contain a mass of spurious short notes or short rests or even triplets. A "quantisation" variable can be set to eliminate short notes or triplets but MIDI display software has no way to distinguish spurious semi-quavers from intended semi-quavers.
• MIDI files do not include information about clefs and MidiNotate will often display your part in an inappropriate clef. Soprano parts may get displayed with a bass clef and bass parts with a treble clef and tenor parts may be anywhere. You can fix this by going into MidiNotate's Track menu and clicking on Clef. The cursor will turn into a bold C. Move this onto the stave that you want to fix and click there. A dialogue box appears and you can choose the clef symbol you want. For the usual tenor clef, choose the treble symbol with a little 8 under it. To avoid having to redo this change when next you open the file, save the file as described above under "Changing instruments".
• MidiNotate may not display a key signature. Instead, it may use many accidentals. In theory you should be able to fix this by using the Key Signature facility in the Track menu, but in our version of MidiNotate it only seems to change the key signature for one bar which is not much use.
• Accidentals may not be displayed as the file creator intended. In MIDI files, pitches are represented by numbers. For example, in the octave above middle C, both A sharp and B flat are represented by the number 70 and MidiNotate has no way of knowing which was intended. It seems to choose randomly which note to display.