What is the best music editor?

[remixor]

Could someone quickly explain what on earth a piano roll is?  I hear this term all the time and I've sort of seen what they look like but it doesn't seem intuitive at all to me.

[Andail]

Instead of lifting the piano while moving it, you utilize those tiny wheels

[foz]

A piano roll....?


My local bakers sell them......heres a picture...

[EldKatt]

If you've seen what it looks like you know what it is, I guess. And no, they're not at all intuitive.

[remixor]

BWHAHAHAH!!!  Andail and foz are teh funy!!111one  

[loominous]

The piano roll:



I think the pianoroll is pretty much the optimal tool when editing/writing midi and very intuitive. I ve had friends try out writing some music through the pianoroll and they grasp the concept very quickly, whereas if I put them infront of a notationprogram they re clueless.

Like I ve said before, notationprograms are imo only handy when writing for instrumentalists. The control you need to create a convincing lifelike result aren t present in notationprograms, (the ones I ve tried anyway) which creates a very dull and mechanical sound. This crappy result can ofcourse be blamed on the fact that it s only midi, so the result is inevitable, an argument in the same style as people blaming their drawingprograms for their inferior results.

[EldKatt]

Yes, piano rolls are easy to understand very quickly, since they're very logical. They do, however, make very little sense in terms of harmony and melody (you can't exactly sight-read or even get a vague idea of how something sounds from looking at them), and when I try to enter something into it, I first have to think carefully (and I'm a pianist so it's not because I'm not familiar with the keyboard layout) to realize where exactly I should click, and then some pixel pushing to get it in the right place. Well, in my experience and opinion, this is. I'm not disagreeing with you.

I do use them for editing MIDIs for more realistic and life-like timing stuff, but for actual composition they make far too little sense to be usable for me. But I guess it depends on who you ask.

(Edit:) Ooh, I sound like I'm arguing. *hugs everyone*

[Cerulean]

Wow, I've been looking for a good piano-roll program for a while. Ad Lib Visual Composer back in the CGA days was the first and last time I could make music on my own.

Let's clarify the relativity of "intuitive."  To be frank, proper musical notation is a largely nonsensical code; it only fully makes sense to those who learned it in their youth like a native language. To people who can read music, piano-roll seems counterintuitive, because it's not the language they know.

To someone who never took music lessons, piano-roll is far more intuitive: you have pitch on one axis and time on the other. To know how long a note lasts, I don't have to know how whether it's the solid one or the hollow one or the one with the flag or the dot... I just look and see how long it is. And each note has its own place on the scale; one doesn't have to write "this note, but higher" as if the white keys are embarassed that the black keys live in their neighborhood and don't want them mentioned directly. Equidistant pitches are represented as such. On a piano roll I can pick out a melody, then decide I want to move or copy that melody a few keys up or down -- and the visual representation of the melody is the exact same shape at any altitude. For people who think spatially, it's a godsend.

[EldKatt]

Actually staff notation is not simply a nonsensical code as you put it--it might be if all you care about is how a melody looks like when played on a keyboard, but if you are in any way concerned with actual harmony (and please don't make this turn into another music theory vs no music theory argument) it makes far more sense than a piano roll, once you've learned it.

An example, which might be at least quite easy to relate to: Imagine a descending so-called harmonic minor scale in A. A, G#, F, E, D, C... In staff notation, the step between G# and F is clearly a second of some sort, albeit an augmented one. (Please, don't complain about the terms I use... I could equally well explain what I mean, but it's much easier for me to use these convenient words and assume that even those of you who hate 'theory' know how to google.) In a piano roll this looks like a minor third. What the hell, you might then ask, is a minor third doing in a simple descending scale? Not a darn thing. (The reason that it's important that this is an augmented second and not a minor third is this: Listen to this particular scale I just described... Does the step between G# and F actually sound like any regular minor third? (Like A-C in the same scale.) No? Then perhaps they're different from a harmonic perspective. Perhaps.)

If none of this concerns you, then you're probably happy with the piano roll. Good for you! I'm just trying to put it in perspective. And don't forget that I'm just some idiot on the Global Internetworkâ,,¢ who's bored enough to spend time on writing this. ^.^

Oh, and the piano roll does make a whole lot more sense (yes, it's actually very very good in this respect) time-wise. I've just complained a bit about harmonic nonsense... but when it comes to time, teh piano roll it teh rules. That's why I do use it for MIDI work after making some sense of the actual notes in some other notation. And yeah, to someone who never took music lessons the piano roll is a godsend. It's great. But some people have taken music lessons (or read about it or whatever) and I guess those are the only ones who'd be interested in the shit I've been talking about.

This is turning into a very long post. Whee. I'm bored enough at the moment to continue, but I'll go have breakfast instead.

Hugs, or something, EldKatt.

[Minimi]

I'm using Fruilyloops Studio 4.1 , and the piano roll is frooty loops is amazing cool. It's pretty similar to the pianoroll of cakewalk... and fruityloops does not work with notations. Neither does it uses MIDI, but Wav, mp3, mod.. etc... You can ofcourse make a MIDI with fruityloops, but then you are limited in your creation.