SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  4/22/06; 12:28:47 PM Topic:  In A Sentimental Mood Msg#:  4825 (in response to 4824) Prev/Next:  4824/4826 Reads:  1873

John, I appreciate your words of praise for the SongTrellis site.

I can't figure out any way to provide melodies for copyrighted  tunes for free. To provide them on the site, SongTrellis would have to pay performance licenses to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC that are each around $1000 to $1500 per year. We'd also have to pay a mechanical license fee (fee for vending a copy of a copyrighted song) to the Harry Fox Agency which is close to 10 cents per download. Beyond that the administrative overhead for applying for these mechanical licenses and doing the monthly reporting is onerous.

I estimated a few months ago, that I'd have to charge between 50 and  75 cents per download to make it economical to provide MIDI downloads of our tunes.  

Such licensing would just provide a MIDI sequence that plays the melody. Getting permission to actually provide sheet music images for the tunes would require individual negotiation with the sheet music vendors. Carrying on negotiations with hundreds of different copyright holders is not what we are most interested in doing.

Curent technology does provide a way to produce sheet music for yourself if you possess software that can produce a readable score from a MIDI sequence. This means that you could download a MIDI sequence to your computer, produce a score from that with additional software and print that score on your own system. Those programs typically are able to animate the scores that are produced so that you can see how they should be performed and can also slow down or speed up playback to match your performance capabilities.

The MIDI Notate program that is available on Windows PCs does do a very good job of producing scores from a MIDI file, but it does not recognize the chord progressions used and is unable to label the chords with chord symbols.

The SongTrellis Music Editor for Macintosh that I've been working on, does not yet do as complete a job of translating MIDI scores as  MIDI Notate does (I aspire to reach that level of performance), but does do an excellent job of deriving chord symbols for the chord progressions in scores.

 If you try out the SongTrellis Excerpt Service which is available from most pages in The Changes, you'll see that a copy of the SongTrellis Editor that is running on one of our Mac servers does do a pretty solid job of deriving chord symbols from a MIDI sequence.

Please join our community at SongTrellis. Our contributors welcome your comments, suggestions and requests. As soon as you join the site (or login if you are a member) a response form will appear here.