It freezes mine too and seems problematic in other MIDI utilities I'm trying—let me keep looking at it. Is it supposed to sound totally bizarre and unmusical? It just sounds like a bunch of notes clanking around, and since you said it was for Frets on Fire I wasn't sure if it was different somehow.
e: Oh, I see. Yeah, even this MIDI worked, it would just sound like a bunch of racket. Its rhythms are right for whatever song it represents, but the notes aren't actual pitches, they just represent the buttons you need to be pushing in the game. Try it with an actual MIDI song and see if that works.
XDMickeYXD: MIDICraft (well, some of the code it uses) requires numpy. You can download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/files/NumPy/1.5.1/. Make sure that the version you download matches the version of Python you're running.
gdscei: I wonder if there's some sort of weird formatting issue, since it got stuck in the MIDI read. Could you link me to the file you were trying and try a different MIDI in the meantime? I wish I knew why these random files were giving me problems.
sn0re: I also wish I knew why people occasionally had tkinter problems. What version of Python are you using (try "python --version" at the command line)?
I'm not really sure it's on topic or why you brought it up, but it's a video from another YouTube user that had been taken down that I had reuploaded. Let's try and keep the thread about MIDICraft please !
Sales-Kital: What sort of problems are you having? If you look through the thread there are several guides to installing Python and numpy, and some common issues are addressed individually as well. If you have a more specific question, I'd be happy to try and help.
Got it to work (yay), but this error shows up sometimes:
...
File "C:\Users\X\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\midicraft\midi.py", line 334,
in readstr
assert str[:4] == "MThd"
AssertionError
This is the error (everything above it is just showing you where the line was called from). "MTHd" (or 0x4D546864) is the part of the file header that indicates it's a valid MIDI file. I'm guessing that smarter media players still can figure it out (if these MIDI files are playing elsewhere on your computer), but the Python code I have doesn't work if the header's not correct. Could you send me or direct me to a file that gives you that error? Everything that I have works fine, but I've had a few other reports of that problem.
And Nalok: the point of my program is that you should be able to do it yourself! If there's a MIDI version of the song you want to convert, then MIDICraft does the work for you, and if you take a little bit of time to tweak it you can get even better results.
Conorman: Are you using the latest version (check the OP or the post at the top of page 3, hopefully I've removed all the older links from my posts)? You should at least be getting a progress bar. I've only tested it on Windows 7 and OSX, but the latest version shouldn't be as mysterious while it's operating.
ClassiestMedic: That definitely looks like a numpy problem. If you open up a command prompt and type "python" on its own, it should get you into what it calls "interactive mode." It'll display the version and some other information about python, along with a new prompt that should look like ">>>". Try typing "import numpy" there and press enter—if you get more errors, then something is wrong with your numpy installation (it looks like your version of Python is matching up, so it could be a 64-bit error if that's what you installed). As annoying as it is, try different combinations of Python versions and numpy versions (sticking with 32-bit if you can) and see if you can make it happen. Knowing your way around these problems is always useful, and numpy shows up in a lot of Python code—including pymclevel, codewarrior's library for manipulating Minecraft levels.
Freak the Mighty: tkinter seems to be a real pain to import. It works on my Windows installation, so I'm just not sure what to say. Has anyone else with that problem on Windows figured it out yet? Try commenting out the other line, so that the effective code is "import Tkinter" (unless that's what you've already done).
ClassiestMedic: The Win32 error isn't anything to worry about. The index error is weird, though—it implies that there's something wrong with the direction it's trying to use. Were you using the GUI or the command line? Which direction did you select? Does the bug happen every time you try to run the program?
Thanks troubleshooters! Any requests for the next video? I'd like to do something long and impressive but the tempo restrictions etc. make some things unsuitable (Bohemian Rhapsody just wasn't working).
I'm also on Reddit (here and here) and someone made a thread on the Polish CraftSite here.
Hm. It sure does make it freeze! It's happening somewhere in the initial read, so it's something weird (hopefully them not following MIDI standards) about the file. If I open it up in Finale and immediately export it (without even making any changes) it works fine, so you do that if you need to. I'll try and figure out a way to look into the problem, but for right now I'm not sure what else I can tell you.
e: Well, a bunch of oldschool DOS MIDI checkers are telling me there aren't any problems in there. I'll keep messing with it but for now I don't have much to say! In any case, it's not happening in the code I wrote (i'm using someone else's MIDI reader) so it'll be a little harder for me to address. Thanks for your feedback!
Oh, I wish I could be more help in Ubuntu! I've actually got a machine sitting around that runs Ubuntu, I should probably pull it out and see if I can fix the last few bugs there.
I'm definitely confused by that error (it's actually not the one I see on my end sometimes). Like I posted before, Python's supposed to look in the local directory first for the module name, and there's definitely a Tkinter.py in there. I suppose that it could be a problem with the try/except block—if you're comfortable editing the file, change
try:
import Tkinter
except ImportError:
import tkinter as Tkinter
to just "import Tkinter" (I can actually make this change in the code, it's from some example). No idea if that would fix anything, but I'm not sure what else to try. You could also try deleting the Tkinter.* files from the directory and see if that works, since it should be included with your python install.
Yeah, that's a weird problem that effects me from time to time too. Is that OSX's Terminal? For some reason I get tkinter errors when I try and run it from the Terminal but it imports fine when I run it in TextWrangler or use the GUI. What happens if you run that without the --help (or any other) arguments? Does it launch the GUI?
Yeah, like I said earlier—opening up the song in a MIDI editor first (like Finale or something) and tweaking it can greatly improve your results. Change your tempos to 60 or 120 bpm, knock out non-essential tracks (although duplicate notes shouldn't be a problem anymore), and adjust the range/instrumentation to play nicer with Minecraft (changing the key to B or F# can help too). Fixing your drum tracks can be good too—MIDICraft only converts a few basic instruments, so anything too busy will just create a bunch of clicks you don't need.
e: And I'm not sure that generating the song on flat terrain is really necessary once I add .schematic support, which will let you place the blocks anywhere you want in mcedit. But thanks for your interest!
Hm. Could you still upload one of the files somewhere so I can make sure they work on my machine? The fact that it freezes during the MIDI read makes me think it's something in the file. Are you using the GUI or the command line? Which OS are you using?
0
e: Oh, I see. Yeah, even this MIDI worked, it would just sound like a bunch of racket. Its rhythms are right for whatever song it represents, but the notes aren't actual pitches, they just represent the buttons you need to be pushing in the game. Try it with an actual MIDI song and see if that works.
0
gdscei: I wonder if there's some sort of weird formatting issue, since it got stuck in the MIDI read. Could you link me to the file you were trying and try a different MIDI in the meantime? I wish I knew why these random files were giving me problems.
sn0re: I also wish I knew why people occasionally had tkinter problems. What version of Python are you using (try "python --version" at the command line)?
0
Sales-Kital: What sort of problems are you having? If you look through the thread there are several guides to installing Python and numpy, and some common issues are addressed individually as well. If you have a more specific question, I'd be happy to try and help.
0
This is the error (everything above it is just showing you where the line was called from). "MTHd" (or 0x4D546864) is the part of the file header that indicates it's a valid MIDI file. I'm guessing that smarter media players still can figure it out (if these MIDI files are playing elsewhere on your computer), but the Python code I have doesn't work if the header's not correct. Could you send me or direct me to a file that gives you that error? Everything that I have works fine, but I've had a few other reports of that problem.
And Nalok: the point of my program is that you should be able to do it yourself! If there's a MIDI version of the song you want to convert, then MIDICraft does the work for you, and if you take a little bit of time to tweak it you can get even better results.
0
0
ClassiestMedic: That definitely looks like a numpy problem. If you open up a command prompt and type "python" on its own, it should get you into what it calls "interactive mode." It'll display the version and some other information about python, along with a new prompt that should look like ">>>". Try typing "import numpy" there and press enter—if you get more errors, then something is wrong with your numpy installation (it looks like your version of Python is matching up, so it could be a 64-bit error if that's what you installed). As annoying as it is, try different combinations of Python versions and numpy versions (sticking with 32-bit if you can) and see if you can make it happen. Knowing your way around these problems is always useful, and numpy shows up in a lot of Python code—including pymclevel, codewarrior's library for manipulating Minecraft levels.
0
0
ClassiestMedic: The Win32 error isn't anything to worry about. The index error is weird, though—it implies that there's something wrong with the direction it's trying to use. Were you using the GUI or the command line? Which direction did you select? Does the bug happen every time you try to run the program?
0
I'm also on Reddit (here and here) and someone made a thread on the Polish CraftSite here.
0
0
e: Well, a bunch of oldschool DOS MIDI checkers are telling me there aren't any problems in there. I'll keep messing with it but for now I don't have much to say! In any case, it's not happening in the code I wrote (i'm using someone else's MIDI reader) so it'll be a little harder for me to address. Thanks for your feedback!
0
I'm definitely confused by that error (it's actually not the one I see on my end sometimes). Like I posted before, Python's supposed to look in the local directory first for the module name, and there's definitely a Tkinter.py in there. I suppose that it could be a problem with the try/except block—if you're comfortable editing the file, change
try: import Tkinter except ImportError: import tkinter as Tkinterto just "import Tkinter" (I can actually make this change in the code, it's from some example). No idea if that would fix anything, but I'm not sure what else to try. You could also try deleting the Tkinter.* files from the directory and see if that works, since it should be included with your python install.
0
0
e: And I'm not sure that generating the song on flat terrain is really necessary once I add .schematic support, which will let you place the blocks anywhere you want in mcedit. But thanks for your interest!
0