I recently started composing songs on MIDI, which I always hated because it sounds like those heinous old Casio keyboards. I have challenged myself to work with the cheese, and create beauty. Well and good. Never dull at my house.
Once I realized that everybody’s MIDI-rendering software is different, and merely taking along the MIDI file to inflict on my friends would not produce the same cheese-o-phony that I hear at home, I started using Audacity to capture the signal that goes to my speakers, and save it as a WAV. That way, whenever I play the WAV file anywhere, I always hear the same thing. All the better.
But WAV files are big and huge and you can’t email them. So I noticed that Audacity has an option to convert to mp3. It won’t go directly from MIDI in the free version, but it’ll convert WAV to mp3. Cool! So I initiate the process. It converted the file, repeatedly; but each time I get a terrible, whack result. It sounds like a bad transatlantic phone line. It sounds like music played through a vacuum hose. It sounds like the old minicassette tape on your answering machine from 1990.
Sounds like a codec thing, right? But I tried every clever codec-type-trick I know, and then I tried removing all of it and reinstalling the sound card driver. Still whack.
MP3 is a lossy format. That means quality is thrown away in the name of size, and you apparently have it set to make really small, really crappy MP3s. It’s entirely possible to make good MP3s, though, but I don’t know enough about Audacity to help you.
Check the bitrate that you are compressing with - anything below 90kbps is suitable only for voice work. I like 192kbps for music, but this leads to larger files.
I was using 128, as this appears to be sort of standard; or at least common.
The song starts out as a 16-track MIDI; but when I record it as a captured WAV file, it’s a new signal, right? No compatibility-type thing going on because the playback is coming out of my sound card, not my MIDI device – is that correct? So then, the weird tinny dual-voiced metallic Tuvan nose flute stuff is almost certainly an artifact of bad compression?
Because I tried a couple other audio conversion utilities with much the same result.
I’ll go try a higher bitrate. If that doesn’t work, is there any other point along the way that it could be going wrong?
Glad to hear it. I’m not sure why 128kbps was so bad, but it may depend on the source material (the mp3 compression algorithm was tuned using a Suzanne Vega song). Your midi renderer (which is probably the Microsoft GM software synth) may use 16-bit samples at a low bit rate (which gives you the cheese you embrace) but produces mp3 compressed output that has artifacts, giving the compressed/filtered effect.
To get a better sounding midi to wave render, use Timidity++ with a massive big soundfont - I like Chorium. But it will have less cheese :D.