Free online TIF to MIDI converter

What the TIF format is

TIF, also written TIFF, is a raster image format commonly produced by scanners and music-notation applications when sheet music is saved as a high-quality page image. A TIF file may contain one page or multiple pages and preserves staff lines, notes, rests, text, and symbols as pixels rather than structured musical data. Scanned scores, archival sheet music, and exported pages from notation software are typical sources.

What the MIDI format is

MIDI stores musical performance instructions such as pitch, note duration, channel, velocity, tempo, program changes, and controller events; it does not store recorded sound or the visual appearance of a score. MIDI is useful for playback in a DAW, hardware synthesizer, sequencer, or notation program, and its event-based structure makes notes easier to edit than an image. Instruments, dynamics, articulations, lyrics, and notation layout may not transfer completely from a recognized score.

How to actually convert TIF to MIDI

Use Audiveris for optical music recognition and MuseScore for MusicXML inspection and MIDI export. Audiveris converts the image into structured notation; MuseScore then converts that notation into MIDI.

1. Prepare the source as score.tif. Use a straight, sharply focused scan at about 300–600 dpi; remove borders, shadows, and compression artifacts where possible.
2. Open score.tif in Audiveris. For a multi-page TIFF, verify that every page is loaded in the correct order.
3. Run Audiveris recognition. Review detected staves, measures, clefs, key signatures, time signatures, voices, and note values. Correct recognition errors before export; an incorrect MusicXML file will produce incorrect MIDI.
4. Export the recognized book as score.musicxml or compressed score.mxl using Audiveris's book export command.
5. Open the MusicXML file in MuseScore with File → Open. Compare the imported notation with the original TIF, especially beaming, ties, tuplets, rests, accidentals, and repeated sections.
6. Save corrections, then choose File → Export, select MIDI or .mid as the format, choose the output filename such as score.mid, and export.

If Audiveris is unavailable, dedicated desktop OMR applications such as SmartScore or ScanScore can perform the same image-to-notation stage, after which the resulting MusicXML file can be opened in MuseScore and exported as MIDI. A normal image converter cannot perform this conversion because changing the TIF container or compression does not create musical events.

Quality and compatibility limitations

OMR is interpretation rather than lossless format conversion. Low-resolution, skewed, handwritten, densely engraved, damaged, or poorly contrasted scores can produce wrong pitches, durations, voices, or measure boundaries. MIDI does not preserve page layout, staff notation, lyrics, articulations, or engraving details, and playback programs may assign different instruments unless MIDI program changes are retained or reassigned.

Inspect the MusicXML notation before creating MIDI, then audition the MIDI against the scan. For reliable results, correct the score in MuseScore or the OMR application rather than editing only the MIDI, because MIDI does not retain enough notation context to repair many recognition errors.