Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Organizing all your dang midi files...

I use midi files for my piano practice.
I've acquired a kajillion of em off various nefarious websites.

How do you keep em all organized???

One big ole directory?
I've got a top level Song dir with
Pop under it (and various other categories)
Then a dir for artist and midi files in there.

For practice, I've got a practice dir with
Try, Learn, Rep and Done.

Learn has the 4 or so I'm actively learning.
Rep has the ones I'm keeping in my fingers (at a slower rotation)
Done has the pile of em that won't fit in Rep, or rather, in my brain.
Those 3 dirs are "flat" no subdirs.
Try has all the songs I'm going to attempt as I get done
with stuff in Learn.


Anybody else have a somewhat (possibly over) rigorous
dir structure for their midi files?

Anybody else use the piano-ish ones for piano practice?

The reason I ask is I'm trying to make PianoCheater easier to use (I'm getting lots of complaints in that area - sigh.)

So I'm hoping to make it EASY to get the midi files you use into a good spot.
And make PianoCheate easier to use in general.

I use midi files for my piano practice.
I've acquired a kajillion of em off various nefarious websites.

Ok I'm old school. How exactly can you use midi files for piano practice?

Old school how? As in classical paper music on an acoustic?

If I find decent midi files with RH and LH tracks, my little app will display the notes
in a pianoroll format (still working on making the sheetmusic format up to snuff) and
it'll play LH while I do RH; it'll play drums, etc.

Stephen, I took a look at your video but one thing really stood out for me. While you mentioned that the player will see x's when one plays wrong notes, for me, music is an aural art form and the visual information in this context is irrelevant.

In music it's always better to use your ears as a final judge ... or am I wrong about this?

I might use sheet music as a guide but the final judge of the sound is still my ears.

well, you'll still hear the note.
you'll just also see the red x so you know which direction to go to find the RIGHT note.

it's good training for muscle memory and it lets you be lazy about reading the exact note.
Oh, it's somewhere over here... nope, nope, bingo!
(good night's rest)
Next time thru, oh yeah, i thiiiink it was this one (nope/bingo)
(good night's rest)
BAM your muscle memory got it for ya.

Your ear is the final judge, of course. But it let's the reflex area of your brain
work on the problem at the same time as the "consciously choosing THIS note" part of
your brain.

Also, this helps you keep your eyes on the MUSIC and not look down at your fingers.

Google for Synthesia.

no thanks...:/

I keep a similar directory setup for pdf scores. The "current" directory is about 5 or so things I like to work on every day, and which can all be opened at once in Foxit reader. Another directory is "studied". Then there is a main "scores" directory. It has a few subdirectories, but they aren't really necessary because file names can be searched for easily on Windows.
(With the "scores" directory open and selected, type -control f-, and a search window opens to the left. Typing a string in that window limits the directory listing on the right to those files containing that string. The desired file can then be selected from the one or a few remaining in the list.)
The "current" directory can be maintained by copying files to it from the "scores" directory, and they can be deleted when they're no longer current, as long as they haven't been edited for fingering. If they have, they must replace the master copy in the "scores" directory.

My main point is that the convenient search function makes elaborate subdirectories unnecessary.

Jack

Thanks Jack, THAT's what I was getting at.
So far I'm thinkin' user picks to put a PianoCheaterSongs dir on
- desktop
- documents dir
- or browsed to path.


In it is...


In Do, you split the hands into seperate tracks, make sure keysig, timesig, and base tempo are ok, add a drumtrack maybe (general cleanup).
In Learning, you add fingering, mark the tricky spots, make loops.
Then when put into Done or Repertoire, it's perfect.

But I think, in general, you just dump all your midi files in "Do"...
That should be a decent enough setup.