Convert MIDI to TEXT

A script, spreadsheet, or archival workflow may require MIDI events as readable .txt or CSV data instead of a binary .mid file. Converting it produces an event listing for inspection and processing, not an audio recording or finished sheet-music transcription.

What the MIDI format is

MIDI is a sequence of musical performance instructions rather than recorded sound. A Standard MIDI File can contain note-on and note-off events, pitch, velocity, channel, tempo, program changes, controller movements, track names, and timing information.

Digital audio workstations such as Ableton Live, Cubase, Logic Pro, FL Studio, and REAPER create and edit MIDI files. Notation software such as MuseScore and Sibelius can import and export them. MIDI is also used by keyboards, arranger systems, game soundtracks, educational software, and music-production projects.

What the TEXT format is

TEXT is not a standardized musical format. A file named .txt may contain comma-separated values, tab-separated fields, hexadecimal MIDI bytes, note names, or a custom report. The extension .text is also just a filename convention; it does not define the data structure.

For MIDI conversion, the most useful target is usually a plain-text event listing, commonly CSV. It can be searched, compared, opened in a spreadsheet, stored in version control, or processed by Python and other scripts. It does not preserve playback by itself; reconstructing a MIDI file requires a compatible event schema and correct timing data.

Convert with MidiCSV

MidiCSV is a suitable desktop utility for converting Standard MIDI Files into readable CSV-formatted text. Its output represents tracks, event times, event types, channels, and event parameters, and the companion csvmidi utility can rebuild a MIDI file from correctly formatted CSV.

1. Install MidiCSV from its official project distribution or a trusted package repository.
2. Open Terminal, Command Prompt, or PowerShell and change to the directory containing the MIDI file.
3. Run midicsv input.mid output.csv. The output extension can be .csv or .txt; the comma-separated content matters more than the extension.
4. Open the result in a text editor or spreadsheet, keeping the delimiters and field order unchanged if another tool will parse it.

On Windows, the executable may be named midicsv.exe. A typical row identifies a track, a time position, an event type, and values such as MIDI channel, pitch, or velocity.

Generate a custom text report with Python

Use the maintained mido package when you need selected tracks, note names, tab-separated output, filtering, or a report designed for a particular application. Install it with python -m pip install mido; the python-rtmidi backend is not required for reading files.

import mido

mid = mido.MidiFile('input.mid')
for track_number, track in enumerate(mid.tracks):
    absolute_ticks = 0
    for message in track:
        absolute_ticks += message.time
        print(f'{track_number}\t{absolute_ticks}\t{message}')

Save the code as export_midi.py and redirect its output with python export_midi.py > output.txt. Mido reports each message's delta time in ticks; the script accumulates those values within each track. It does not calculate seconds unless the program also interprets the MIDI file's division setting and tempo meta-events.

Use online conversion carefully

General online converters commonly convert MIDI to MP3, WAV, or notation formats, but they often do not export the underlying MIDI events to text. Use a web service only when its documented output explicitly supports MIDI-to-TXT or MIDI-to-CSV event export, and check the service's retention and privacy terms before uploading unpublished or proprietary music.

For reliable structured output, a local MidiCSV installation or a local Python script is preferable. A web converter that merely produces audio or a visual score does not perform the same conversion.

Quality and compatibility limits

Plain text does not automatically produce lyrics, sheet music, or audio. It describes messages stored in the MIDI file; turning those messages into notation requires a notation program, and rendering them as sound requires a synthesizer or sequencer.

MIDI timing is normally expressed in ticks. The real-time duration of those ticks depends on the file's division setting and tempo events, so a tick-based export is exact for event reconstruction but not a seconds-based performance timeline. A tempo-aware report must process tempo changes, usually from the tempo track in a type-1 file.

Type-0 files contain one track, while type-1 files commonly contain multiple synchronized tracks. A custom script must preserve track identity and event order if the text will later be converted back to MIDI. Type-2 files contain independent sequences and require software that explicitly supports that format.

Keep the original .mid file before editing exported rows. With MidiCSV, modify only documented fields and preserve the CSV structure; use csvmidi for reconstruction only after validating timing, event names, channels, and required end-of-track events.