Re: [Rosegarden-devel] midi to mp3

[Silvan <dmm...@us...>]

On Thursday 10 November 2005 02:04 pm, bo...@gr... wrote:

> hi all, could somebody please help out a little
> I wrote a piece of music, played it in the keyboard and saved to floppy,
> edited in rosegarden and voila, there it was.
>
> now I want to distribute this, but as mp3, is there a converter I can use
> for this between midi and mp3 in rosegarden package ....?

That's a bit like asking if there's a way to convert a player piano into a CD 
player.  They just aren't the same thing at all.  MIDI is a series of 
instructions telling something how to make some noise.  An mp3 file is a 
collection of noise that something made.  The in-between step here, the 
taking of instructions and making of noise, depends *enormously* on your 
setup.

One option is to use Timidity for this.  It's too much to get into trying to 
come up with a syntax example for you, so I leave you to install it and read 
the man page for yourself.  It can definitely create a .wav file out of 
a .mid file, using a soundfont you provide (or most distros I've seen have a 
timidity package that comes with a rather lame sounding default soundfont 
that you can use if getting it to work quickly is more important than getting 
something that sounds good.)  It can work with .mid files, but not .rg files, 
so you'll have to re-export your work, and hope the export works.  (I'm not 
sure how serviceable it is; I know there are outstanding MIDI export bugs we 
never got around to fixing.)  Once you have the .wav you can use something to 
convert it into an mp3, although I'm not sure what, off hand, since I go with 
the flow and use ogg format instead.  I'm sure there's something out there to 
convert a .wav into an mp3 though.

The Timidity option might be all you need, but it's not your only choice.  The 
other alternatives involve playing the MIDI with (for example) Rosegarden, 
and then getting the resulting audio channeled into a recorder somewhere.  
The how of that is where the enormous variation comes in.  This is a wide 
open subject, and I couldn't possibly detail all the different ways you might 
do this.  Just an example of what can be done, I've got some stuff that has a 
Sound Canvas (external to the computer, piped through the soundcard), the 
on-board hardware soundfont synth on my soundcard, ZynAddSubFX and maybe 
Hydrogen all playing at once, recorded through JACK (and the soundcard's 
mixer) with Time Machine.  It's the way to go for the most options and the 
best sound and stuff, but getting into all of this is enormously more 
complicated than using Timidity.

-- 
Michael McIntyre  ----   Silvan <dmm...@us...>
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek;  registered Linux user #243621
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