How do I get a MIDI file from my Casio keyboard onto my computer?

Factual Questions
1

I have a Casio CTK-671 keyboard with a 6-track sequencer. Up till now, I’ve been creating the songs on the keyboard, which are then stored in the keyboard sequencer’s memory, and then dumping them onto a cassette tape. Works nice.

But now we are in the 21st century, and I wanna dump the songs onto a CD; in order to do this, I understand that I need to put them on my computer first.

I have the E-Mu USB-MIDI cable installed, so I’ve got the keyboard connected to the computer. Windows XP, as the E-Mu is not compatible with Vista.

But past that point, I need help.

All the manual says is “Start up the software you want to use on your computer”. Casio’s website is a vast unhelpful wasteland.

So I “get” that I need software of some kind. Would Cakewalk do this? And if so, which of their applications would I need?

I don’t want to create the music on the computer, so I don’t need sequencer software; I want to create it with the Casio’s keyboard, with its rhythms and intros and tones and stuff, and then do a “song transfer” (?) to the computer. Not sure if the Casio supports that, actually.

Is there (faint hope) a small freeware utility that would let me do this?

I thank in advance anyone who has the patience to help me with this. :slight_smile:

2

For what you want to do maybe it would be better to go from the Casio audio out to your computer’s sound card. Otherwise I think if you use the Midi-USB then you will only get raw midi data, not the actual sounds. Midi-USB would be more for if you had software on your computer with sounds that you wanted to use instead of the Casio’s sounds.

3

Cakewalk is probably way too much software for your application. There should be a ton of share/freeware programs that you can use to backup and edit your tunes. I’m not sure that you’ll find a very basic utility that only allows you to make backups. I think you might come to appreciate the ease of PC editing, especially compared to the typical ‘user interface’ on most keyboards.
A brief google session returned these:
Music MasterWorks
Anvil
Able

I’ve not tried any of these. I used ‘midi editor free download -ringtone’ for search terms.

4

OK, lets clarify exactly what you are trying to do.

You have a 6-track set of midi data (as a song) on your keyboard. You want this song on a CD. Remember, a midi file consists on Note on/off data. So a midi file is not like an audio file on a CD, it needs to be rendered to an audio file. Your keyboard does this so you can hear it, and your PC will have an inbuilt midi file renderer from Microsoft (which is rubbish).

You can do one of two things.

  1. Grab the audio (using the Casio audio out and your computers line-in and something like Audacity). This means that the exact sound of your keyboard is turned into an audio file that you can transfer to CD.

  2. Dump the midi data to your PC via the midi cable, into something like Cakewalk, and save it as a midi file. It may be that your keyboard allows this sort of dump via the midi out port, but you will need to check the Casio manual. Actually, there is software called Music Data Management Software found here that will let you download the stored songs as a midi file (I guess). Then, to make an audio file you can put on a CD, you need to render the midi using a midi file renderer (such as Timidity++). Depending on what you use as your sound source (a Soundfont file) the final audio file will sound slightly different (better or worse) than your keyboard.

Si