Short README on the use of SONIC, a program for transcription of piano music. 

First: This software is provided without any guarantees, it may not
work or may give you headaches or worse; use it at your own risk.
You can use it for free and without limits. Also read the disclaimer.txt

What it does?

SONIC takes an audio file (e.g. mp3, wav) as its input and tries to produce
a transcription in the form of a MIDI file. It presumes that  the wav file contains 
recorded piano music. If not, results may be even more awkward.
It produces a MIDI file, which hopefully contains some correct notes and very 
likely some incorrect ones.


Installation.

SONIC runs under Windows OSes.
Unzip the zip file that contains the software into a folder and that's it. 
You should leave the directory structure as is; the main folder should contain 
one subfolder named networks.

If it doesn't work, install the following prerequisites:
	.NET Framework 4.5 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42642)
	Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145)


Use of SONIC.

SONIC is a command line utility. It has many command-line parameters, but most are irrelevant for
general users; you should use it as:

  sonic AUDIO_FILE MIDI_FILE [parameters]
    where AUDIO_FILE and MIDI_FILE represent the names of the input 
    audio and output .mid files.

After you start it, SONIC should start transcribing; it will print out
the time (in seconds), as it processes the audio. It is in no
way optimized for speed, so take a coffee or two first, and a beer
or eleven later on.
If using SONIC makes you feel good, notify the author. If not, delete it.


Who can I contact?

If you have any questions, you can contact the author: Matija Marolt
from University of Ljubljana (matija.marolt@fri.uni-lj.si). 
Also see SONIC homepage
Optionally read the paper on SONIC:
M. Marolt, A connectionist approach to automatic transcription of polyphonic piano music, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2004, Vol. 6, no. 3,  pp. 439-449, 2004.



	