Note to mods: this has to do with my own compositions, so it’s not a copyright thing.
Can I do this in Windows Media Player, or should I use another app?
Basically, I have MIDI files of my music, but I don’t like sending them around, because no matter how fantastic your sound card, it just won’t sound like it does coming through a keyboard. (My keyboard is my PC’s MIDI output device, through an external MIDI translator.) So I’d like to convert these MIDIs (originally sequenced in Cakewalk) to MP3 or another suitable format in order to send them to future collaborators.
I seem to recall finding out I could do it in WinMedia, but now that I try, I can’t figure out how, and it’s late, and I want to go to bed. Help me please!
A good way to approach conversion problems like this is a Google search for ““x to y” freeware.” (Where x is your input file type and y is the output). That search yielded this utility:
neutron star:
If scott evil wants the same sound produced by rendering his MIDI files with his keyboard, using a solely PC-based conversion utility is not going to do it. This conversion is a bit more involved than might be otherwise evident, because the MIDI and MP3 formats represent music in completely different ways. The MP3 format encodes the actual sound waves corresponding to the music (modulo some lossy compression), while the MIDI format encodes commands that tell how to generate the music at a high level (i.e. what notes to play, for how long, and with what instruments). In some sense, MIDI is like electronic sheet music while MP3 is like electronic audio tape. When playing MIDI files, the actual instrument sounds are provided by the MIDI renderer (i.e. the keyboard or sound card, or in the case of TiMidity++, the converter itself). It’s these sound card-provided instrument sounds that are not up to the quality of his keyboard, and I would guess that the TiMidity+±provided sounds are not much better than the sound card ones, and may be worse.
scott evil:
To actually get the keyboard-rendered sound into MP3 format, you’ll probably need to connect the digital or analog output on your keyboard output to your sound card’s relevant input. Then play the MIDI files through the keyboard while capturing the sound card input. You’ll probably have to capture it to WAV format first, then use an MP3 encoder to convert to MP3. Since I don’t use Windows, I can’t recommend any particular applications, but those two tools should do it for you (sound card capture tool and MP3 encoder). Your sound card may even have come with a capture tool.
Also, in case you didn’t already know, your collaborators won’t be able to do much with the MP3 files other than listen to them, since they lack the semantic information present in the MIDI files (as the conversion is, in general, only one-way).
Attempting to simultaneously play on MIDI and record to WAV on the same computer through the same soundcard is likely to be tricky or impossible, either from a software or hardware viewpoint. These kind of applications rarely work happily together simultaneously. They each like to have priority.
The obvious way is to simply record the output from the keyboard (using as high a quality recording equipment you have available) and then use an audio link into the sound card of the computer to record the playback directly to MP3 or via a WAV.
[semi-hijack]
I’ve tried Midi-WAV converters in the past and they always produce the same “casio keyoboard” sounding instruments that my crappy soundcard did.
Why is this? Why couldn’t the software have well developed, awesome sounding instruments? Or is it that I always used freeware, as opposed to some real expensive software package that has all the awesome sounding instruments built in?
IOW, in a High School musical play, one year, we couldn’t get a decent band together, so we basically played Midi files on a computer…they were output via the MIDI port to some “MIDI Box” that had an INCREDIBLE instrument selection onboard. The Box converted the MIDI signal to realistic sounding music, which were played through some real nice speakers…sounded fine.
WHY couldn’t those same wonderful instruments that were in that box be included in some PC-Software based solution.
I’d love to convert MIDI files to WAV or MP3 using some rich sounding instrumentation, but every converter I’ve found used such lousy instrumentation as to make it almost no different from playing it directly through the sound card’s MIDI interpreter.
Here are some high quality Gravis Ultrasound patches for use with TiMidity++. Eric Welsh collected the best instrument patches from archives all over the internet and made them available on his site. There’s also a mailing list for MIDI related discussion, especially as pertains to TiMidity++ and eawpatches.
Having burned several CDs of classical music, TV/movie soundtracks, and video game music using wav files produced by TiMidity++ and eawpatches, I can attest to the quality of these patches.
Why not just take the ouput i.e. from the headphone jack of your keyboard, or 1/4 outs if you have them and send it to a recording device? If you have, say a Nomad Jukebox, you could record directly to MP3 format and it will sound exactly like the sound that you hear out of your keyboard.
It’s not an issue of playing MIDI and recording WAV on the same sound card. My SoundBlaster has nothing to do with MIDI output on my setup, because I have my keyboard connected through a MIDI converter. It’s the keyboard that receives the MIDI info and then generates the sound, not the sound card.
So the DUH! answer (which I didn’t think of last night, because I was both tired and medicated) is to connect the line out of my keyboard to the line in of my sound card, then record as I would record any other line in. I downloaded a freeware app that records from line in to MP3, WAV, etc., and I’ll give it a whirl tonight.
Thanks for your replies. You can keep discussing MIDI stuff if ya want…
(Can’t wait to get a newer version of Cakewalk… the one I use is so old… let’s just say it was designed for Win 3.1… :eek: )
