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Topic: Importing a MIDI with Lyrics (Read 4142 times) previous topic - next topic

Importing a MIDI with Lyrics

I am not a musician. I am laboring and hurting a lot because of my ignorance of music. I am a pastor in Mexico (American missionary), and we solved a problem of not having any musicians in our church with VanBasco. It plays midis with karaoke words. Everything fine for 10 years now, but now we are noticing some errors in the hymns, and I am trying to fix things. The main problem are these minor errors that my people won't let me live with. "El" in Spanish should have an accent "Él".

So I created these hymns with another pastor, and he has since died. He did most of the work. But the process is to create the nwc file in NoteWorthy Composer and then export it. I have since lost the original NWC files. I tried importing the midi back into NWC but it comes in as a line which cannot be edited. It is there in the staff, but the midi shows no lyrics activated. I open Staff Lyrics, and no lyrics are activated. I change the Lyric Line count to 1, and I can add lyrics, but they are on top of what the import has.

How do I edit a MIDI then? Can somebody tell me exactly how to import the MIDI with lyrics correctly so that they end up in the Lyrics 1 tab?

A second related problem is to export the NWC file into a MIDI file, and the Spanish accented letters would show correctly. áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ and ñÑ¿¡. Any help people? I am like a month trying to figure out how to do this and nothing.

Re: Importing a MIDI with Lyrics

Reply #1 –
As a first "base line experiment", I wrote a short piece with all your symbols, exported it as MIDI and reimported it; and then again exported MIDI and reimported. As far as I see, all the symbols are correctly written and read in - so in principle, there's no problem with NWC-generated MIDIs (see attachments for my files). Also, printing the Spanish symbols works nicely.

To understand more of your problems, could you attach your MIDIs here - all of them in a ZIP file, e.g.?

H.M.

Re: Importing a MIDI with Lyrics

Reply #2 –
Quote from: davidcoxmex –
...How do I edit a MIDI then? Can somebody tell me exactly how to import the MIDI with lyrics correctly so that they end up in the Lyrics 1 tab?
Oh, I see: As far as I can see, the lyrics end up on a separate "layered" staff which has only "rhythmic notes" in it, where the lyrics are attached - see the attached image of my re-imported file.
You can go to that staff with "Page Down" (it will become highlighted - see second attached image), and after pressing Ctrl-L you can now edit the lyrics.

Quote from: davidcoxmex –
A second related problem is to export the NWC file into a MIDI file, and the Spanish accented letters would show correctly. áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ and ñÑ¿¡. Any help people? I am like a month trying to figure out how to do this and nothing.
Oh. After installing VanBasco, it seems that it cannot handle "UTF-8" characters - it shows them as some garbled letters (3rd attached image). Hm. Two possible solutions - but both need a little more research:
  • Use another karaoke player that can handle "UTF-8 lyrics";
  • Convert the MIDIs to "local Windows codepage" with Spanish symbols.

I'll look a little into it ...

H.M.

Re: Importing a MIDI with Lyrics

Reply #3 –
3rd posting on this - not nice what's going on in this world (only talking about MIDI  ;) ). I have found a way to put Spanish letters into lyrics and then have them showing up in Van Basco ... but it's not at all nice. Maybe someone else here can improve on it ...

First, here are two things I tried that did not work:
- Saving the music as NWCTXT, converting this from UTF-8 to ANSI (e.g. with Notepad++), reading that in with NWC and exporting as MIDI. NWC gets confused by the non-UTF-8 lyrics and exports ... well, nothing usable.
- Exporting from a MusicXML to MIDI via MuseScore (MuseScore does not save any lyrics in MIDIs).

What works is a chain via Reaper:

1. First, work around the "first syllable not shown" problem of Van Basco (or Karaoke files in general?):
- Add a rest at the very beginning of the NWC file (I use a whole rest);
- Select it, open Properties (e.g. Alt-Enter) and change "Lyrics" to "Always"; press ok.
- Add a first syllable to the lyrics (I use a single period)
==> see attached SpanishLetters1.jpg and SpanishLetters.nwctxt.

2. Export MIDI file from NWC.

3. Import it in Reaper (open new project, drag MIDI file in [hit OK on "Import ... tempo map] - creates a new track)
(For the Reaper DAW software, see reaper.fm website; there's download link somewhere there. Reaper is a huge software - I know only 1 % of it; but no need to get scared  8). It's only free for 60 days IIRC; for me, it was worth the 50 or so $$. Maybe all this here also works with Audacity? - which is free ... edited: No, it doesn't :( - lyrics show up as UTF-8 encodings)
==> see attached SpanishLetters2.jpg

4. Export from Reaper via "File->Export ..."; select a good filename (I take the original one and add _ViaReaper. In the example, that would be SpanishLetters_ViaReaper.mid).
==> see attached SpanishLetters3.jpg

Reaper, who could read in the UTF-8 lyrics from the NWC-exported MIDI, exports the lyrics now in "ANSI encoding", which can be read by Van Bosco.

5. Load the exported file into Van Basco.
==> see attached SpanishLetters4.jpg

It works (mostly; once I only saw a copyright message in Van Basco). But it's cumbersome, error-prone, what-have-you ...

H.M.

Re: Importing a MIDI with Lyrics

Reply #4 –
I hope the OP will come back and tell us what he decided. Harald, thanks for trying to be helpful. It is a complicated solution for sure.