Audio to MIDI

About Audio-to-MIDI

Melodyne allows you to export audio notes as MIDI notes, in order, for example, to double your vocals with a sound from a software synthesizer.

The MIDI notes are an exact representation of the audio notes in Melodyne. For each audio note, a MIDI note is created with the same position, length and pitch. The velocity of each MIDI note is derived from the amplitude of the audio note it represents.

That is equally true whichever algorithm is used, with a few algorithm-specific exceptions: In the case of vocals, breaths are not exported as MIDI notes; and if you convert rhythmic material or material edited with the Universal algorithm into MIDI, all the MIDI notes will share the same pitch but take their position, length and amplitude from their audio equivalents on the rhythm track. You can use this technique, for example, to derive from a drum loop a quantization reference for other MIDI tracks in your DAW.

The generation of MIDI notes from audio material offers a wealth of different creative possibilities. Try it out for yourself!

Exporting MIDI

From Pro Tools and Pro Tools Ultimate versions 2020.11 upwards, the export of MIDI employs ARA technology and is therefore particularly closely integrated into Pro Tools. You can trigger all the actions directly from within Pro Tools; not only is no transfer necessary, you do not even need to have Melodyne on the track. There are three different ways of proceeding:

Export the entire track via the menu: To do this, right-click on the track and choose Extract MIDI to New Track from the context menu; this converts all the clips on the track into MIDI. In the dialog box that appears next, you can stipulate (among other things) that a single track should be created either for external MIDI or an internal software instrument, and the notes will then be transferred to this.

Export individual clips via the menu: To do this, select the clip or clips you wish to export, right-click on one of them and choose Copy Audio as MIDI from the context menu. This converts only the selected clips and stores them on the clipboard, so that you can paste them from there onto a MIDI track.

Drag and drop: If you already have a MIDI or software instrument track in your session, simply drag one or more audio clips onto this track.

Whichever of the three methods you choose, a dialog box opens with various options, one of which is invariably the choice of algorithm to be used for the analysis.

The algorithms displayed here by Pro Tools are those of Melodyne. All of them, incidentally, are available – including the polyphonic ones – regardless of the edition of Melodyne you are using, even if it’s the entry-level Melodyne essential.

Once you have made your choice and confirmed it with OK, Melodyne conducts its analysis of the audio clips and provides Pro Tools with the corresponding MIDI data. The process doesn’t involve the audio clips actually opening in Melodyne; everything happens, so to speak, behind the scenes.

If the audio clip in question has already been edited in Melodyne via ARA, you will generally not want a new analysis (‘detection’) of the material to be conducted, as the material analyzed would be the original audio recording rather than the edited version; whereas what you would want converted to MIDI, if, for example, the original audio clip contained a vocal melody that you had subsequently altered in Melodyne, would be the new melody, not the old one.

To achieve this, the procedure is initially the same as the one described above (for clips to which no Melodyne editing has yet been applied): The dialog box opens in Pro Tools, and you choose your settings.

When it comes to the choice of algorithm, however, you should leave the default setting (“Automatic”) unchanged, in which case the MIDI clip generated will be based on the current (Melodyne-edited) melody and chords, not those of the original recording. If you were to select a different algorithm, the result (depending upon your choice) might be a discrepancy between the melody and chords of the MIDI clip and those of the (edited) audio clip. The results could, of course, be interesting and might even on occasion be desirable, but as a rule, if you’ve already edited the clip in Melodyne, leave the default setting (“Automatic”) and exit the dialog with “OK”.