Midi Conversion
First thing you will need is a midi file.
I like to use THIS WEBSITE
and the search function on the top left of the page to find my source file for the song i want to play in game. So lets for this example search for PINK FLOYD.
Next i decide what song i want to do. I chose the song "Is There Anybody Out There"
when i click it i see a page like this...
God ahead and click download then choose to EXPORT FULL SCORE and your file will begin to download
Ok now we have our midi file on our pc and downloaded.
Next we want to open that midi file in Maestro application
if you have not already done so you can download this application from the tab at the top of the website labeled
ABC Player and Maestro
alternatively you can just click the above text to download the .msi
Open up maestro and it will look like this go ahead and open the midi file we downloaded in the previous step with the program.
ok good so now we have our song open in the program we want to select whatever parts of the song we want to export by ticking the small box to the left of that part,
then click EXPORT TO ABC (or control+E) to export that song to a file that will show us the notes in LETTER ABC PLAYER FORMAT so we can use them to make a song for gw2!
Choose where ever you want to export your .abc file perhaps make a directory for them if you want to collect them or just export to desktop if you intend to erase the abc file after your done.
next we want to right click the file and choose the OPEN WITH option. From the options we want to open this file with WORDPAD to view its content.
Good now we have the letter notes for our song! lets copy the content of our song like so...
Now that we have copied this portion with all the notes of our song lets clean it up for composing on gw2.
Visit the site by clicking this ---> Text Cleaner
Ok now as you can see there are some less than relevent to an AHK file format symbols and text within our letter notes. Now i wont go into great detail on this in this post perhaps another. But i will give some examples that are pretty standard for each midi file you will convert.
The idea is we dont want anything but LEGAL text.
SO lets define what LEGAL TEXT means as far as MUSIC BOX AHK FILES ARE CONCERNED.
To start with our instrument AT BEST (the harp is the best) has 3 octaves MAX. The LEGAL NOTES in these octaves is As follows
Octave 1 has
a b c d e f g and additionally the high c'
Octave 2 has
A B C D E F G
Octave 3 has
A, B, C, D, E, F, G,
and we can put them in brackets to make chords
[A,Ce] for example is what a chord will look like. and this is also legal.
TIMING:
Sometimes we may find numbers AFTER a letter or chord.
This represents the time it is played for,
So if i took a NOTE and added timing i could say use A,2
Now as a CHORD i might see something like [A,Ce]2
placing our timing always AFTER not WITHIN the brackets will make these legal to play in a .ahk file for music box so keep this in mind.
Lets say i have a chord that looks like this
[A3/4B3/4c3/4]
that is not legal so to make it legal i would first remove the timing in the backets then add it to the END of the chord
Then [A3/4B23/4c3/4] would look like THIS cleaned up.. [ABc]3/4 making it legal text and now playable in music box script.
So this will take some practice to learn to do.
CHARACTERS TO REMOVE
Some characters will simply be removed and bare no use to us in music player
you may see for example some of the following:
+MP+
+MF+
+PPPP+
+FFFF+
=
|
these are all characters that simply bare no effect on our music box playback but were useful to ABC PLAYER on our pc. We can remove them and will have to if we want to avoid a syntax error when playing back in composition tools. SO REMOVE any of these type of ILLEGAL text because your song WILL NOT PLAY with illegal text in music box.
When you see ^ this indicates an ACCIDENTAL (sharps and flats are not supported by guild wars 2 actual in game instruments as a whole so the less accidentals the better the song will convert, the more their are the worse its gonna sound just a fact we must come to terms with being it is a IN GAME LIMITATION OF THE INSTRUMENTS THEMSELVES, So either REMOVE THEM or use a NOTE SUBSTITUTION METHOD to replace them. for example if you see ^F you can quite often simply just remove it and use F and it sounds fine. Other times this note must be "substituted for a closer or more accurate note in its stead.
All that said when you are done cleaning up the text we can move on.
go ahead and copy your now LEGAL and clean text.
now we want to open the composition tool in this case i will chose HARP <--- click here to open it.
as you can see above we have cleaned up our abc song file to all LEGAL syntax now we want to set notes per beat, beats per min this can be found at the top of the abc text file in pink floyds is there anybody out there the timing was 4/4 (so ill set 1/1) and 100 for our bpm..
ok now click PLAYBACK and have a liten adjust the npb or bpm as desired till it sounds right check for any syntax error in playback (illegal text must be fixed to make our song work) remember the point of using the cleaner is to adjust this to be in the proper syntax for this composition tool. So be sure this is the case.
IF your song plays back to your satisfaction. We can move on to the next step. IF NOT keep working on your syntax and get it right before you export it. IF YOU ARE READY TO EXPORT JUST CLICK EXPORT BUTTON AS SEEN BELOW.
When you click the export you will get something like this
CLICK COPY TEXT TO CLIPBOARD from the AUTOHOTKEY SCRIPT section as shown above.
Next...
Open up MUSIC BOX and choose to add a new song!
CONGRATS HOMIE!
YOU JUST CONVERTED A MIDI FILE TO AN .AHK FILE FOR PLAYBACK IN GAME! WELL DONE! NOW GO PLAY YOUR JAM FOR ALL YOUR ADORING FANS MY NINJA!
<3
