MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a communication standard developed for electronic musical instruments and computers. MIDI files allow music and sound synthesizers from different manufacturers to communicate with each other by sending messages along cables connected to the devices.
Creating your own original score can be one of the most creative and rewarding aspects of building a multimedia project, and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the quickest, easiest and most flexible tool for this task.
The process of creating MIDI music is quite different from digitizing existing audio. To make MIDI scores, however you will need sequencer software and a sound synthesizer.
The MIDI keyboard is also useful to simply the creation of musical scores. An advantage of structured data such as MIDI is the ease with which the music director can edit the data.
A MIDI file format is used in the following circumstances :
• Digital audio will not work due to memory constraints and more processing power requirements
• When there is high quality of MIDI source
• When there is no requirement for dialogue.
A digital audio file format is preferred in the following circumstances:
• When there is no control over the playback hardware
• When the computing resources and the bandwidth requirements are high.
• When dialogue is required.
Audio File Formats
A file format determines the application that is to be used for opening a file. Following is the list of different file formats and the software that can be used for opening a specific file.
1. *.AIF, *.SDII in Macintosh Systems
2. *.SND for Macintosh Systems
3. *.WAV for Windows Systems
4. MIDI files – used by north Macintosh and Windows
5. *.WMA –windows media player
6. *.MP3 – MP3 audio
7. *.RA – Real Player
8. *.VOC – VOC Sound
9. AIFF sound format for Macintosh sound files
10. *.OGG – Ogg Vorbis
Red Book Standard
The method for digitally encoding the high quality stereo of the consumer CD music market is an instrument standard, ISO 10149. This is also called as RED BOOK standard.
The developers of this standard claim that the digital audio sample size and sample rate of red book audio allow accurate reproduction of all sounds that humans can hear. The red book standard recommends audio recorded at a sample size of 16 bits and sampling rate of 44.1 KHz.
Software used for Audio
Software such as Toast and CD-Creator from Adaptec can translate the digital files of red book Audio format on consumer compact discs directly into a digital sound editing file, or decompress MP3 files into CD-Audio. There are several tools available for recording audio. Following is the list of different software that can be used for recording and editing audio ;
• Soundrecorder fromMicrosoft
• Apple’s QuickTime Player pro
• Sonic Foundry’s SoundForge for Windows
• Soundedit16
You can download these software from www.files2pc.com
