Opening MIDI files and recordings

Ferrous Lineup can open music that was made somewhere else: a MIDI file of a piece, a chord sheet saved as text, or, as an experiment, a recording. Each becomes a new song, with its chords on the chord sheet and its key on the harmony keys, so you can study it as you would a demo. When the song open before has unsaved changes, you are asked first.

MIDI files

A MIDI file holds the notes of a piece, not its sound: which note starts when, how long it lasts, how hard it is played, and which instrument should play it. Many pieces can be found as MIDI files, and most music programs can write one.

File > Import MIDI file… opens one (.mid, .midi, .kar or .rmi). You can also drop it on the window, or open it with Ferrous Lineup from your file manager. The song that comes out:

• has a channel for each part of the file, named after its track or its instrument, with the instrument the file asks for, and its volume. The drums become one channel per drum, as in the channel rack of a new song;
• keeps every note as it was played: how hard, and exactly when, even between two steps of the grid;
• is cut at bar lines into patterns, laid one after another in the playlist; a passage that comes back note for note plays the same pattern again;
• takes the file’s tempo changes, time signatures and key signatures. A file with no key, or one that says C major when its notes are plainly in another key (many programs write C major when nobody chose), gets the key its notes fit best;
• gets on its chord sheet the chords the app hears in it.

The status bar sums it up, as in canon-in-d: 3 channels, 77 notes, 9 bars, 4/4, 72 BPM, D major:

From there it is a song like any other: play it, slow it down, look at each part in the piano roll, change its sounds in the mixer, try a style from the Library on it, and save it as a .lineup file.

Getting the chords right

The app hears chords as a musician would hear them over a stretch of music, not note by note, and it gets most of them right. Where a piece moves fast, or its harmony is unusual, check what it heard: click a bar and type the right chord (see The chord sheet).

Chord sheets as text

File > Import chord sheet… opens a chord chart saved as text, as in | C | Am7 | Dm7 G7 |, and the band plays it. Such a text is what File > Export chord sheet… writes, and what you find in songbooks and on websites. The format is in The chord sheet.

Recordings (experimental)

File > Import recording… opens a sound file (MP3, WAV, FLAC or Ogg) and tries to play along with it. You can also drop the file on the window, or open it with Ferrous Lineup from your file manager. (A WAV file of ten seconds or less dropped on the window is taken as a sound for a channel instead: see The channel rack.) It listens for a few seconds (Listening to … in the status bar), then makes a song with two tracks:

• Recording: a channel that plays the whole recording;
• Harmony: a chord on every beat, on the chords it heard.

It also guesses the tempo, the time signature, the key and the key changes, so the bar lines, the chord sheet and the harmony keys follow the music. The song’s key is the one the recording stays in longest. The recording plays wherever you start: from the beginning, from a bar you click, or after a jump. The status bar says what it found, as in canon-in-d: 63.9 BPM, 4/4, D major, chords on 43 of 43 beats.

Hearing a full recording is much harder than reading a MIDI file, and the result is often wrong: the tempo may come out at half or double speed, and chords may be heard where a passing melody note sits. Treat it as a starting point to correct, and trust your ears over it.

The recording is saved again as a WAV file next to the original, named like song.ferrous-lineup.wav (or in the system’s temporary folder if that folder can’t be written to), with a little silence in front so its first downbeat falls on a bar line. The song plays that file and only says where it is, so keep it with the song.