Synchronising live music file (mp3) to an instrument score

[stovalo]

Hello everybody,
Since a couple of years I'm trying to play the bassoon. Now, since a couple of months I have to reherse a musical of wich I have every song as an "mp3 live performance" file. I also have my bassoon-score as a pdf, musicXML and Midi (I scanned it with CapellaScan). It would be great to be able to see the score scroll by as the music plays, so I can reherse at home. As you can imagine, the live performed music has an ever changing tempo Is there any open source linux software or any combination of it, that can synchronize the score to the mp3 ? (maybe Sibelius and Finale can, but they are much too expensive...)
I'm running Ubuntu Studio 9.10 and experimented a bit with Rosegarden, but this isn't very easy, or maybe I'm doing it wrong, since I'm relatively new to those things.
Has somebody got an idea how to do this ?

Thanks a lot.

[studio32]

I think Rosegarden is good for that, all though I'm asking myself if this is a really good practise method.

I suggest you to learn the piece bit by bit. Start at a (very) slow tempo and then push the tempo if it goes well.

Maybe also useful is the app 'playitslowly'

[stovalo]

Thank you for your reply. The reason I'm doing this, is because the bassoon score doesn't resemble by far the overall melody of the song, so it is for me in my third year of solfege and intrument very difficult to know where to start and stop playing. Of course I have to look first if I can play the notes, but that's not enough. I have to know when to play them and I found out that playing along with the mp3 helps allot in this regard. Anyhow, music is my one hobby, computers the other and I try to combine them together,don't we all?! I suppose there must be a correct way to go about synchronising mp3 and midi in Rosegarden. Have you or anybody else done this before ? MP3 first or midi first ?...Adjusting time, speed ? Splitting the files?
Thanks
Geert

Musical: Saga Candida / Zaad van Satan by Bert Appermont (moeilijk!!)

[studio32]

I think qtractor or Rosegarden should do the job for you, they both handle audio and midi

[musicbloke]

syncing it up it is a NIGHTMARE, but here's how.

load the MIDI file into rosegarden and mute all the tracks that come up.
load the mp3 file into an audio track and zoom into the wave view so that you can see exactly where the track starts. move the start of the audio to the start of the MIDI.
Now zoom out so that you can see the whole audio track.
Start to adjust the tempo (slower if the MIDI is shorter than the audio, faster if the MIDI is longer) until the two endpoints meet
Unmute the MIDI tracks.
Voila! -not!
caveats--if the tempo of the mp3 fluctuates even slightly this will not work, and you will have to manually adjust the tempo (even as much as one bar at a time) to get it to sync.
--if rosegarden decides to adjust the audio speed (you can configure it not do this but i'm blessed if i can remember how).

my advice would be to do what orchestral musicians have been doing and complaining about) for centuries and COUNT the BARS REST. it took years before i found that easy to do. i was a cellist, we get less time off than you, but the guys who kept their jobs longest were the ones that COUNTED!

see you on the scaffold!

[raboof]

The JACK Transport mechanism would be an interesting tool to tackle this.

JACK Transport can emit not only 'frame numbers', but also 'bar-beat-tick' information. The solution would require:
- a JACK Transport Master that emits both frame numbers and BBT information
- an audio player that listens to the JACK Transport frame numbers
- a score/midi viewer that listsens to the JACK Transport BBT information

For the audio player, you could probably just convert the mp3 to wav and use jack.play

Is anyone aware of a score/midi viewer that can sync to JACK BBT information rather than frame numbers?

For that JACK Transport Master, I'm not aware of any JACK Transport Master that does this right now, but it would make for a nice small building block. Perhaps Ardour or Rosegarden can do this, too, though. It would need to know some fixed locations in the song ('frame number X is beat Y') and interpolate the rest. For a 4/4 song this should be no problem, but if there's some changes of time signature it could become more of a challenge.

[stovalo]

Thanks for your reply.
It would indeed be nice to be able to tag a number of positions in the mp3 and the midi and combining the tags automatically by stretching or compressing the intermediate sections. I tried that in Rosegarden, but it wouldn't work...Maybe in a future release
I have to try the other suggestion as soon as I have a bit more time.
Thanks again.