imitone community

Koray

Member

Registered: 2015-07-13

I am finding this unusable as yet

False notes, wrong pitches.  The normal stuff I guess.  It's not drastically wrong but it's wrong enough that I can't see myself getting anywhere with the current version.  I followed suggestions from the forum here--I tried moving the mic around, not breathing into it, singing (with various vowel sounds), whistling, and dropping my tempo.  Some things helped but I found no combination that would turn imitone 0.7 into a useful tool.  But maybe a future version will work for me.  I've spent $25 in worse ways than this, anyway.

You said in another thread:

> Thanks for the sample -- this will be a very useful specimen as I move forward.  (I'm going to need to think about how to encourage people to submit more)

Seems like you could probably handle this right from imitone itself.  Stick in a prominent, friendly-looking "having trouble?"-type icon among your existing pretty icons, and make that go to a dialog that offers a "report sample" option.  Have that activate a simple mode wherein imitone works normally but also stores both the incoming audio and the generated MIDI in a recording that runs for the next several seconds or whatever.  When it's done automatically upload/e-mail it to you/imitone.com/whatever.  OR SOMETHING.  But yeah it really seems like you should be doing something like this right?  People like me who want it to work and who also want to show off how badly it's failing (in order to vent frustration) will give you some decent test data probably.

This thing seems promising and it'd be cool if it worked well for almost everybody.

Other feedback:

I am probably never going to pick a key.  I don't care how much it helps--if I can't have accidentals wherever I happen to spontaneously want to put them, then I might as well not be using a real-time transcription tool to begin with.

I'm not really keen on the idea of reducing my tempo to accommodate imitone, either.  I mean your promo video shows this being used to make live music.  It's mainly a real-time tool right?  Decreasing the tempo is okay for non-live recording, which is all I'm aiming to do anyhow...  but still it's an unappealing suggestion, and (if I understand correctly) seems contrary to the spirit of your design.

The UI is pretty.

Evan

developer

From: Olympic Peninsula, WA

Registered: 2014-05-23

Website

Re: I am finding this unusable as yet

Hey, Koray --

The algorithm in the current beta has a lot of problems, many of which I've already improved upon.  I'm doing heavy research and development right now, trying to make a real-time tool that works "like magic" -- but it takes a lot of fine-tuning to get it there.  In the mean-time, some work-arounds are necessary to get it to work well enough.

The most authoritative resource on working around 0.7.0's finicks is here:  http://imitone.com/tips -- volume threshold is a major factor, and the auto-adjust algorithm is pretty useless right now.

Regarding sample submission, it's something I would definitely like to do, but I'm not sure if it will happen by the next version due to my limited web programming skills.  I've been building up my own library of test samples, which helps a lot.  Maybe for version 0.8.1 I will look into this?

Regarding what you say about key selection...  There will be new functions in imitone soon (eg. anti-gliss mode, auto tracking) that might make chromatic operation a little more practical, but I'm curious if a "soft" key snapping function might be useful?  That is, something that narrows the "hit zones" for out-of-key notes to give you something half-way between a locked key and chromatic mode.

Re: tempo, that's mainly necessary because of the algorithm's limitations.  Future versions will render it unnecessary.  The promo video is a highlight reel from the show, and everything there is unedited 0.7.0 usage -- (with the exception of one clip where we removed one of the singers so the other could be heard better).  The "tips" article above describes the procedure I follow to fine-tune my rig for showfloor demos, minus the multi-voice stuff.

Thanks re: UI.  I'm working with a wonderful designer on it.  We will be adding more pretty soon.

Let me know what you think.

Koray

Member

Registered: 2015-07-13

Re: I am finding this unusable as yet

Regarding sample submission, it's something I would definitely like to do, but I'm not sure if it will happen by the next version due to my limited web programming skills.  I've been building up my own library of test samples, which helps a lot.

I was suggesting that you do it right in the imitone program itself, so as to capture the user's frustration right when it arose, and turn it into something more pleasant and more constructive.  No need for web stuff then.  But whatever, it's none of my business.  I wasn't complaining that I can't submit a sample; I would be glad to not do that little bit of extra work.  The root problem for me is that imitone doesn't work as well as I want it to.  It's easy to imagine that samples you collect manually could be enough, in which case this feature would be unneeded.  Keep improving the algorithm etc. and you'll solve everybody's problem.

Regarding what you say about key selection...  There will be new functions in imitone soon (eg. anti-gliss mode, auto tracking) that might make chromatic operation a little more practical, but I'm curious if a "soft" key snapping function might be useful?  That is, something that narrows the "hit zones" for out-of-key notes to give you something half-way between a locked key and chromatic mode.

I have no idea.  Sounds somewhat promising, but also somewhat dubious.  You/we would have to try it, to see how well or poorly it would work.  Might be worth implementing if it doesn't take a lot of time.  (It sounds fairly simple.)

One could imagine other ways of dealing with this problem, too.  For instance, I imagine that I want to be able to sing any note that's on the musical staff, and have it recognized--but maybe in reality I'll only tend to use just one or two specific out-of-key pitches in a given song, and leave the rest unused.  So then imitone, if it were able to see that this was happening, would have an opportunity to automatically "learn", as I sang, to completely lock out those unused out-of-key pitches while making an effort to recognize the one or two I was using.  That's just a crude idea of how it might work...  the reality might be a lot more complex.  There's probably some sort of high-level melody-predicting logic you could conceivably put in in order to make pitch recognition more closely match the singer's intentions without actually requiring any extra manual configuration.  But maybe it'd be very very hard to design, and expensive to implement.  I have no idea.  This could be a deep topic.

And if you can get basic pitch detection working well enough, then it will also be a mostly irrelevant topic, as it should be.  At any rate, I don't expect you to explore it much further than you've already done (with your simple key-selection feature), at least not in the near future.  You're only one person, and software development takes forever.

In general, what you say sounds promising.  I'll try a later version, maybe get a better microphone or something...  maybe it'll work for me eventually.

Last edited by Koray (2015-07-21 12:02:53)

Evan

developer

From: Olympic Peninsula, WA

Registered: 2014-05-23

Website

Re: I am finding this unusable as yet

Just to clarify a bit:  the error recording function would be right in the program itself, but I need to do some backend work on my server to accept uploads.  I'm much handier with application programming than server programming, so I've been procrastinating it, haha.

Advanced / adaptive pitch tracking functions are a deep area for future research.  I'm hoping to make something serviceable out of a few relatively simple features, but we'll see.