MIDI -> audio conversion?
 

Does anybody know of a clever way to convert MIDI data to an audio file suitable for burning on a CD? I've just completed a project with Mrs. Dallas that required this, and I tried to find a way to do it, but I couldn't, and we had to just dive in & kludge it since we had a deadline. I did it by playing the MIDI and recording it to .wav files with Total Recorder, but that was brutal because it had to happen in real time (and we're talking about 70 tracks totalling about 2 hours), and of course corrections had to be made, etc. But now that it's done I'm wondering for future use if anybody has any bright ideas for doing this more directly.

assuming that winamp can play midi, can't remember off-hand if it does or not. You could use the wav out feature of it to send it to a wav file of your choice.

Steinberg Cubase? It comes with a couple of built-in software synths, or you can use it to drive your sound card synth and export the resulting wave file.

I'm guessing the midi files in question are done with GM sounds and instrument assignments?

Oh...also Sonar, Cakewalk, those sorts of programs.

I might know someone who has those sorts of things if you really need them for future reference. :D

And then there's this...haven't tried it, but it seems to be what you are looking for.

http://www.midi2wav.com/

I think there are a couple of websites out there that will do it for you. Then again, you could just get a friend who has "timidity" on Linux to do it for ya. :)

Yeah, but all those do real-time recording. I accomplished that just fine with Finale and Total Recorder. I was hoping for a digital conversion, so it doesn't take 2 hours to record 2 hours worth of music. But the more I think about it the more I think it's simply not possible. When you do MIDI, there's actual hardware processing to translate the note number etc. into sound.

I'm not too sure about that. One of the things that timidity does is play midi without midi hardware... it essentially converts the midi to a wav-like format and sends it to the sound device. If you send it to a file, instead, it can do it at processor/drive limited speeds.

However it does still take SOME time.

Hmmmm I'll check it out.... it does look more promising than anything else. Although it says that if your processor is fast enough you can play the sound in real time, so I'm not sure what it says about speed. I may install Linux this weekend (I have to get Mrs. Dallas to make double-plus-sure she has all her files off the hard disk from the old computer before I repartition it), and I'll give it a try.