WaoN - A Wave-to-Notes Transcriber

WaoN is a Wave-to-Notes transcriber, that is, the inverse of timidity by Tuukka Toivonen (and its descendants timidity++). ("WaoN" also has a meaning of harmony of notes or chord in Japanese!) My original intention is to pick up voicing of harmony from sound of my favorite pianists. (I have no talent to do so, but computer will 🙂 But there is no functional application of this kind on Unix platform, as far as I know. So I began writing this WaoN by myself.

Currently, WaoN contains three programs:

• waon: transcriber (wav-to-mid converter)
• pv: phase vocoder for time-streching and pitch-shifting
• gwaon: GUI for waon and pv

WaoN is released under the GNU General Public License. Here is the Project Page @ SF.

Features

• read wav file and write standard MIDI file format 0.
• stdin/stdout can be used as input/output file.
• no explicit limits of number of notes at a time or along the time.
• patch file (wav) can be used.
• pitch shift.

Platform

I believe that WaoN is able to be built on any platforms, but I develop it on FreeBSD.

Currently, (to my knowledge) there are some packages:

• port for FreeBSD
• rpm (for openSUSE) is also in download section.
• package for Ubuntu by Jussi Schultink.
• the site www.brummer.de.hm has debian package (ver. 0.8) for sidux with a script "waonmidi".
• package for AUR.
• package for GNU-Darwin.

Formats

WaoN's native format as sound-input is WAV, and that as note-output is standard MIDI format 0. If you have SoX, you can use almost all sound format as input. In addition, if you have timidity or some midi player which could read standard MIDI file from stdin, you can play resultant midi file on time. See also Tips.