15. Saving and exporting

Exporting MIDI

A MIDI file carries the notes, the tempo and the song’s controllers to almost any music app: a DAW to produce the song, another notation app, a hardware sequencer. Stab writes it as the song plays, so what you hear in Stab is what the other app plays.

Exporting MIDI

Available on every platform.

Exporting

Open the Export sheet and pick MIDI (or choose File › Export As › MIDI…). Choose What (the whole song, the loop or the selection’s bars), Tracks, and Channels: A Track per Part, or A Channel per String (below). Then Export writes the .mid file in the folder shown.Then Download: the browser saves the .mid file; the web app keeps no files of its own.

What the file holds

The file is a standard MIDI file (type 1, 960 ticks a beat):

• A first track with the song’s timing: its tempo, time signatures and markers. A tempo that ramps is written as steps a sixteenth apart, as MIDI has no ramps.
• A track for each of the song’s tracks, each on its own MIDI channel, with its name, instrument, volume and pan. Drum tracks are on channel 10, as General MIDI expects.
• Every note as it plays: linked copies and repeated clips written out in full, grace notes around their beat, strums rolled across the strings, staccato notes at half length, tremolo picking and trills as single strokes. A clip’s transpose, gain, fades and velocity ramp are carried by each note’s pitch and velocity.
• Smart Tracks as the notes they play, and the Chords track’s chords as notes on a part.
• Automation on MIDI controllers, pitch bend, pressure and program changes, sent where it changes. A drum lane’s own volume, pan, tune and decay have no MIDI form and stay in Stab.
• Lyrics as syllables on their notes, the way karaoke files write them.

Bends need a channel of their own to be heard right, so the ordinary export doesn’t write them: use the export with a channel per string, below.

One channel per string

A Channel per String under Channels (or Export MIDI, One Channel per String… from the command search) writes each string of a guitar or bass track on its own MIDI channel, as MIDI guitars and MPE instruments expect. Each note’s bend, whammy and detune go with it as pitch bend on its string’s channel, with the bend range set to 24 semitones so any bend fits. Channels run out at 15 (channel 10 stays for drums): a track that doesn’t fit gets a single channel.

A song shared with you whose owner keeps it in Stab has no exports; see Shared songs. Any song you can open, you can export: exporting is never counted against the free songs.