Melodyne is good but not that good!

I don't think anybody here would recommend trying to do an audio to midi on a mixed-down drums stem. If anything, I'd tend to research the living daylights out of the issue, to see if it were possible - there's not a whole lot of pitch information to work with to differentiate - it's all percussive.
 
A video demonstration of converting drums to midi at the Celemony web site clearly shows them working with a single miked track - the snare drum. (This is one of the reasons many folks like to work with separately miked drums).
 
I understand you're upset, but I think it's a little over the top to blame 'hype' for the situation.
 
About the only way you can a replace drums instruments from a mixed stem is to mark transients and either replace with midi notes or clips. It's a slog....
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hi guys, thanks for your replies - 
@SuperG - well yeah I can, in a way, as the stuff I read made it seem like it was pretty easy and straightforward...but to be fair, I could very well have misunderstood too
 
@LRR - I did it on the Poly setting which is how I read it needed to be done. The percussive mode (I thought) was for the single instrument tracks..
 
At the time I mixed down the parts, I had NO idea Sonar X3 was coming and even less idea about Melodyne!!! Had I had an inkling I may have tried a little mroe to use the program I wrote the drums from to export to midi tracks as well...I still could do that, but there is like, 148 songs 

I don't think i saw anyone imply melodyne could easily separate a drum kit.  Even when I described doing it, i admitted it was a convoluted method I would only try out of desperation and it involved a lot of work with R-mix and gating.  Melodyne is ramarkable software  but it has its limits. If you have a busy full kit with tons of cymbals and high hats going at the same time  along with a bunch of ghost notes, it's just too much to ask.

I believe Celemony could make a rudimentary multitrack drum to MIDI work if they wanted to. They wouldn't even have to make the translation pitch accurate (that would be ridiculous), I'd be happy with a line of notes that represented one drum, a line of notes that represented another etc, and I'll take it from there. Basically all you'd need is the timing of each hit, and the different hits on different lines. I mean I'm pretty sure their algorithm could differentiate a kick from a hi-hat. Perhaps we'll see this kind of functionality in a later version, even if it can't fully translate the complete articulation of a drum kit 
 
I think my main problem with Editor is that the polyphonic audio to MIDI translation doesn't work quite as well as I thought it would...at least it requires a lot more work to get it right than I expected. Even just fingerpicking some basic clean guitar chords confuses it sometimes, and I have to do so much work to clean it up that I wonder whether I should have just transcribed the damn thing into the PRV myself lol....still, on occasion it has produced some remarkable results. My first attempt was of a sample of a Spanish guitar piece, and it made a damn good job of the MIDI without me having to do a thing. 
 
 

Maybe in 2099, a VSTi will be able to do this, but there is not a program on earth that can extract a competed mixed down drum set and break it down the way you want.
 
Use individual drums to go from audio to MIDI and not the mixed down drums in a single wave file or clip.
 
CJ

This is more of a wishlist rather than a critique?
 

I too had high hopes at using Melodyne to create a midi track from a section of a song with a guitar solo from Allan Holdsworth, though he was playing over the whole band.
 
It DID get some of the notes, but it also missed a whole bunch of them, and I ended up concluding it was just not going to be able to do it.
 
Please understand I do not blame Melodyne for not being able to extract the guitar notes - I knew it was a long shot from the outset of the experiment.
 
I have not tried it on single instrument tracks, but may do so at some point.
 
Bob Bone
 

joden
I have been trying for a while to get Melodyne Editor (upgraded form the X3 version) to drop a drum track to a midi track. Others on this forum reckon they are doing it but I think they are only using single part (ie just a kick drum or just a snare for eg) audio drum tracks. I am trying to get an audio drum part (kick, hi hat, snare, occasional cymbal) into a midi track using Melodyne and so far it is not really working out.. All I get is note gobbledygook! And nothing even close to a usable midi drum track!
 
Oh well that was money wasted - back to recording the drum parts manually to midi.
 
PS: It DOES work fine on a single audio drum instrument part, but the ones I need to convert are pretty much full kits.

what melodyne is looking for in the material is tonal information (melodic mode), and even though there is some tonal information in drums it's not like the snare's pitch is all about the note D and the kick is a C and the pitch of the hihat lies on the F# ..it's just too much frequencies and chaotic overtones in there for your idea to work.
for this to work celemony would have to develope another way for melodyne to analyze the material.
 
I think it's unfair to say that melodyne "is good but not that good", since you're trying to do something celemony never said melodyne can do in the first place.

.

.

plus 1 to jb 101
 
Melodyne has a far higher quality in editing (not only Vocal-) tracks
than any other tool .
It´s kickass!

CJaysMusic
Maybe in 2099, a VSTi will be able to do this, but there is not a program on earth that can extract a competed mixed down drum set and break it down the way you want.
 
Use individual drums to go from audio to MIDI and not the mixed down drums in a single wave file or clip.
 
CJ

That functionality exists NOW as a standard drag and drop feature within Ableton Live - therefore the technology exists so why can't Melodyne do it?  I too was upset having bought the full license only to find it didn't work.  Instead I have to open the stereo Wav of the drum loop in Ableton, press one button (convert drums to midi) then import the midi file to Sonar

joden
Yep agreed, I never said anything different - note the post title, I already stated it was good! On single instrument parts I already said it did a good job.
 
However the spiel can be misconstrued to indicate what myself and others were trying was possible - for example here is a direct cut and paste from the FAQ section at Celemony...
 
 
 
Is it possible to create a MIDI file from polyphonic audio recordings?
 
Yes. With Melodyne editor it is indeed possible to detect single notes in a polyphonic recording and to export them as a MIDI file.
 
This is not yet possible, however, in Melodyne studio or Melodyne assistant. Here, the source audio file must be monophonic.
The playing technique is crucial, too: Sustained notes, coming from open strings on a guitar for example, have to be damped to maintain a monophonic signal.
 
Just in case others think I made it up the link is http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=faq&L=0#c3294 and then scroll down to MIDI And Synchronisation

 
I don't think it's wrong of Celemony to write "Yes. With Melodyne editor it is indeed possible to detect single notes in a polyphonic recording and to export them as a MIDI file."

Drum hits aren't notes. They're... hits.
 
Melodyne analyzes the material and gives you MIDI-notes where it detects the most salient frequencies (with harmonic overtones). It's that simple. What you get isn't "note gobbledygook". The note obbledygook is what you put in, since a wave form with a full drumkit doesn't contain any specific salient frequencies (with harmonic overtones) ..or rather; the MIDI-notes you get is where melodyne finds these frequencies in the wave form with the drum track.
 
So: Melodyne detects the tonal infromation in the material and seperates the notes based on this (this fact becomes very clear watching any of their videos) it's not very hard to understand it can't detect different drum sounds in a single waveform (keeping this very accesible information from celemony in mind)

Either Live or Reason (I forget which) has a feature whereby you beatbox a drum beat with your mouth and it will convert it to a MIDI pattern with all the hits pitched correctly. Not sure exactly how it works but it sounds pretty cool. 

I haven't tried this yet, but on something like a guitar solo (or bass part) I would think filtering out what you want with R-mix first (and/or EQ) and then applying Melodyne would improve results.