Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer

Subject: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 12:28 AM

I have two techie questions.

1. Can I download a midi file from the Web, do whatever conversion is appropriate, and burn a CD that wiil play the tune?

2. I have a couple of CDs, made by friends, which contain mp3 files. Can I copy them first to my computer and then to a blank CD?

I have Windows Media Player and Real Player on my computer. I can download freeware, but I can't afford to buy any software.

I did a search of Mudcat forum, but I didn't find answers to my questions. If I missed something, please tell me where to find it in a *polite* way.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 05:16 AM

You might try This Thread. It may not answer your questions directly, since it talks about tape to other format, but you should get a list of "related threads" at the top that you can also browse through. Click on a couple there. Easier than searching, perhaps.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: GUEST,Mr Red giving Sound advice?
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 05:23 AM

down load is no problem. You may want to consider playing the Midi while the PC recorder is running. Edit that for length. Then burn an audio CD using the WAV. MAke all the all the Audio controls visible and see what controls what (look for recorder controls too)

BUT

Set the recording parameters well. 16 bits essential, sampling at 44K is best. The burner may cope with grot recordings but they sound terrible. READ the HELP files on each application - they give you clues like this. I use Soundforge XP - to edit and record. MP3 converters may insist on 44K stereo 16 bit files.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Bill D
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 01:33 PM

if you know how to do the burning, you can do any and all of the tasks you mention- with the reservation that you can't 'play' a CD of midis the same way you'd play a regular CD, and not in a portable device. You can choose a list of midis from Windows Media Player and play them in order. (Atleast I assume you can...I use Media Player Classic, which I like MUCH better, and it will play 'almost' anything. I just played 4 midis in a row using it. There are many wonderful free programs which will play MP3s, and MP3s can now be played in many portable devices, too...

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 11:06 PM

Bill D, I'm listening to mp3s on a portable player as I write. :-)

What I want to do is download some midi files of Irish music and make a CD which someone can play on his CD player. One of my students is moving to California in March, and I want to give him a CD with irish tunes which he can play while he drives cross country and then in his new home. Is this a realistic goal? Is Media Player Classic free? Knowing you, I suppose it is, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 11:13 PM

Oops! Bill D, I forgot to say thanks.

Pauline

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: hesperis
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 11:34 PM

goldwave is shareware and should work for recording midi to wav, depending on the capabilities of your soundcard.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Bill D
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 11:34 PM

Media player classic is free...

in order to play midi tunes on a CD, I think you'd have to convert them by running them thru a sound card and recording the sound in another format...then they would BE MP3s, or .wavs with CD format. This could be done, but would be sorta tedious, I'd guess.

There are programs (and almost all programs *I* know anything about are free..*grin*) which will record anything they hear and turn it into another format...it's just that midis are not usually picked.

I just did a quick search and found this, which suggests that you are almost reduced to playing a midi, putting a microphone in front of the speaker, and recording the sound in whatever format you want. The deal is, the whole point of midis is to be generated in the computer in order to compare tunes..etc...Other formats are meant to put on CDs....

You could easily give someone a CD full of midi tunes, but they'd need a computer to play them.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Bill D
Date: 21 Feb 05 - 11:45 PM

it 'might' be that you could find a shareware like Goldwave with a trial period and make a CD like you need during the free phase.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: pavane
Date: 22 Feb 05 - 04:58 AM

Just a note:

MIDI files consist just of lists of commands to play notes. What you get out when playing your MIDI very much depends on the quality of your sound card and its MIDI implementation. Some (more recent) are MUCH better than others, but I have not yet heard one which compares to playing the MIDI via an external (e.g. Roland) sound unit.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: GUEST
Date: 22 Feb 05 - 06:44 AM

Don't know if this is any help but if I want to change a midi into an mp3 (on my Mac) I
just drag it in to iTunes and save as an mp3 or m4a and then it can be burned as usual.
The snag is that while this does nothing to the midi by way of improvemet (or deterioration),
it does make the file a LOT larger.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: pavane
Date: 22 Feb 05 - 07:34 AM

Wav & MP3 files will ALWAYS be much bigger than MIDI. MIDI uses about 8 to 12 bytes to tell the MIDI instrument turn a note on and off. The sound of the note itself is generated by the sound card, it is NOT stored in the MIDI file!

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Bernard
Date: 22 Feb 05 - 08:16 PM

For around $25.00 you can get software which converts MIDI to WAV 'on-the-fly' - and you can download a demo version which may be enough to do what you need... here.

The demo version only allows 10 second clips to be saved, but there are ways around that. The quality of the results is dependant upon the quality of your sound card, of course.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 23 Feb 05 - 12:52 AM

Pavane, thanks for your explanation of what MIDI files are. Understanding a little theory helps.

Bill D, how would I put a bunch of midi tunes on a CD that someone could play in his computer? My preferred price range is the same as yours. :-)

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: GUEST
Date: 23 Feb 05 - 12:49 PM

If someone wants to play them on a computer, then you can just copy the MIDI files unchanged to a CD (formatted as a data disk). Cost is zero. He will be able to play them with the standard software on the machine.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: GUEST,MTed
Date: 23 Feb 05 - 01:16 PM

Find someone with a Mac running OS X and have them do the conversion that GUEST mentions above, and burn them to a CD--

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 24 Feb 05 - 12:06 AM

Guest and Guest,MTed, there's something I don't understand. Do the midi files need to be converted to something?

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Bill D
Date: 24 Feb 05 - 12:12 AM

no...if he has ANY program which will play midis, having them on the CD will allow them to be accessed and played from the CD as files, just as if they were on his hard drive. \They would only need to be converted IF they were to be played on some portable device or AS MP3s...for whatever reason

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 24 Feb 05 - 12:55 PM

Thanks, everyone. We've gotten to the point where my task sounds do-able. I won't say that it's easy or it's bound to work until I try. :-) Then I'll let you know how it goes.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 15 May 05 - 07:35 PM

OK, I'm back for more advice. I have a CD containing many mp3s of wonderful music. I want to copy it for a friend. I have copied all the mp3 files onto my computer. In fact, I've done it twice, so my computer now has everything from the CD in both mp3 and wav format. I want to copy all these files to a CD in mp3 format. I have tried, and I can copy them to a blank CD, but not in mp3 format. Can I do this? If so, how? On my computer I have Windows Media Player, Roxio, and Dell Jukebox by Music Match. I can't afford to buy any software (or practically anything else).

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: hesperis
Date: 16 May 05 - 03:10 AM

If you have winXP, it comes with basic CD burning software. Just put in a blank CD, select to open a writeable folder, copy your mp3 files to inside the writable folder, and then select write files to disc. When it asks if you want to make an audio cd say no, you want to make a data cd.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 16 May 05 - 08:55 AM

You will fit more Mp3 files than the same ones converted to the appropriate Audio CD wav format onto the same size CD.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 16 May 05 - 02:02 PM

Foolestroupe said You will fit more Mp3 files than the same ones converted to the appropriate Audio CD wav format onto the same size CD. Yes, I know. That's how I could tell that the CD I had copied to didn't have mp3s.

Hesperis, I will check to see whether I told my computer to make an audio CD or a data CD. (I'm at work now.)

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 18 May 05 - 01:36 PM

Hesperis, I think you've diagnosed the problem correctly. When I try to copy my music files in mp3 from my computer to a CD, I can do it by using "music CD" but not by using "data CD." OK, now that we have the diagnosis, can anyone suggest a treatment? To make my question mopre difficult to answer, I must impose a limitation: I don't have any spending money. I'd appreciate your suggestions.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: robomatic
Date: 18 May 05 - 02:00 PM

Just to backtrack a little.
A music CD comes with music with all the information it's ever gonna have. It is stored in digital form similar to but not exactly the same as WAV files.

WAV (wave) files have the same kind of information as the CD music, again, in it's most memory hogging form.

An mp3 is a distillation of the music in a compressed form, typically 1/10th the size of the WAV files. However, an mp3 file is DATA.

You can play mp3 files on your computer with a program such as 'winamp', which is free to download, and, of course, portable mp3 players. There are also some very nice and inexpensive music personal CD players and boomboxes which will play mp3's burned on to CDs. Typically you have to be careful how you label the mp3's (on the computer) so the boombox will understand them. The manual will explain this. Mine requires me to have 3 digit track numbers such as 001, 002, etc. or it won't recognize 'em.

If you burn mp3 files onto CDs to be played AS mp3s, then you burn a DATA CD. This can be used to move the mp3s from computer to computer, or played on the specialized CD players I mentioned.

If you burn mp3 files onto CDs to be played as an audio CD in a regular music player not as mp3's, then you burn the CD as an AUDIO CD. The program will then 'expand' the mp3 data into a WAV format so that a regular audio (non mp3) CD player can play them. When you do this, you lose the space saving advantage of the mp3, because the WAV format takes up a lot of room. And obviously, the audio CD played from an 'expanded' mp3 will sound the same as the mp3. If you gave up noticeable quality when the original mp3 was made from the original music source, you won't get it back by converting the mp3 back to a WAV. You get playability on an audio CD player, period.

Hope this helps.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 18 May 05 - 05:06 PM

Robomatic, that was a very good explanation of what happens. Are you a teacher?

I still have an unanswered question: I want to copy music files stored in my computer as mp3s to a CD, also in mp3 format. This means that I have to burn a data CD. How do I do this? The software I have now won't do it.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Bill D
Date: 18 May 05 - 05:57 PM

Pauline...try this free one

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: robomatic
Date: 18 May 05 - 06:12 PM

Pauline: I'm not a teacher, but I'm used to talking people through things and being talked through things.

The usual software for doing what you want to do almost always comes with the CD burner. The two main programs that i know how to use are:

Nero, which is usually found in a folder in the programs section of your computer called "ahead nero"

Or CD Creator. Both programs are pretty easy to use.

What software are you using now?

You don't say if you are using a computer with a CD burner that came with it (software should have come with it, too) or with a CD burner that was installed at home (A CD with the software almost certainly came with the burner). What is your operating system, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Millenium, Windows 98, or Windows 95?

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 19 May 05 - 01:14 AM

Robomatic, here is my info. I use Roxio CD Creator, which came with the computer, as did my CD burner. I have Windows XP Professional. Roxio CD Creator is the software that would not let me make a data CD from my mp3 files (music) on my computer. What do I do now?

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: Pauline L
Date: 19 May 05 - 01:21 AM

Bill D, I just looked at the free software you recommended. I knew I could count on you for a recommendation for freeware. ;-) However, I'm not sure whether it will do what I want it to. It "can convert music files from AudioCDs into practically any format you'd like, including: MP3, WAV, OGG, and others." I can already copy my audio CD files (mp3) onto my computer as mp3 files. The problem is copying mp3 files on my computer to mp3 files on a CD.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: robomatic
Date: 19 May 05 - 02:20 AM

Pauline: I'd have to see what you're doing, but Roxio should be able to create a data CD for you, and mp3 files are just data. You should have everything you need to burn a host of mp3 files to a CD.

Subject: RE: Tech: mp3, midi, CD, and computer
From: JudyB
Date: 19 May 05 - 03:55 PM

Pauline -

Can you copy other kinds of data to CDs? Make backup copies of the words of songs or of photos or things like that? The process for MP3s is the same. The version of Roxio on my computer has a File menu on the left side of the toolbar at the top, and if you choose New CD Project, among the choices is "Data CD" - do you have anything like that?

Good luck!
JudyB