First of all, thanks to urlwolf for answering. I didn’t expect this one being a topic for discussion.
After re-reading my post, I realize that my wishes for the media player of the future fall into two categories.
1) Features for the general public:
- Synchronization (beat detection – as in DJ software - and generation of a sync timebase)
- Meta tags, with quick browsing between them
- Looping
- Tech-oriented visualizations (oscilloscope, spectrum analyzer, see below for a combined log spectrum/musical keyboard display, a running spectrogram would be nice too)
2) Features for amateur musicians (maybe geared towards the implementation of the ultimate entertainment/didactic keyboard):
- synchronization of MIDI and audio of the same track
- MIDI recording of live performance
- synchronized visualization of the score to the audio track (with meta tags being displayed too)
The conversion of audio to MIDI (or to a score in a more general sense) is an art, or at least a discipline, by itself.
Reading another thread (dealing with Media Center under Linux
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=29475.0) I browsed to the site of a company that makes a cross-platform library, and from there I found out that a program, Transcribe!
http://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/version7.html, exists that does just help a person to transcribe music. It displays the (log) spectrum of a selected part of the audio waveform over the representation of a musical keyboard, with pitches aligned between the two. This is a great suggestion for a new kind of visualization. Such a display in real-time, although not immediately useful, would be great-looking. With names of the higher-energy notes being highlighted. The correct use of such a display, however, is a trial-and-error in very short audio loops.
Transcribe! is not an automated tool for converting audio to MIDI at all, but it helps people a lot in doing that. After all, converting an audio track to its score is something that an amateur musician might like to do (or a professional musician has to do as a job). To an amateur musician, this is entertainment in itself, besides being the source for almost unlimited creative inspiration. It should not be automated at all.
Also, there are people who make a living creating professional-grade MIDI files. With MIDI files, I think there could to be a lot of legal issues dealing with intellectual property, as having the score to a track and being able to use sequencers and synthesizers means being able to make a reasonable reproduction of the track itself. But it requires human intervention, it is not easy and dumb-proof as downloading an MP3 file, so the issue does not seem to be major.
I understand that the issue of syncing audio to MIDI is a really big one, I just thrown it in as a wish, no more. Features for amateur musicians (point 2) are really too advanced, and I expect to see then in a media player (if ever) in the not-too-near future. Features for the general public (point 1), however, are feasible, so I’m going to suggest them as improvements for MC12.