| Grex > Agora46 > #199: Recording music from piano |  |
| Recording music from piano | 
Sep 3 21:29 UTC 2003 |
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| response 1 of 15: |
Sep 3 21:32 UTC 2003 |
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| response 2 of 15: |
Sep 3 22:37 UTC 2003 |
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| response 3 of 15: |
Sep 4 00:43 UTC 2003 |
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| response 4 of 15: |
Sep 4 01:30 UTC 2003 |
I've never heard of Cakewalk, Tod-- can you describe?
| response 5 of 15: |
Sep 4 03:37 UTC 2003 |
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| response 6 of 15: |
Sep 4 12:40 UTC 2003 |
for about $35 you need only the midi adaptor by Advanced Gravis. You should have an open RS-232 port in the back of your computer (7-pins + 8-pins). This is where a joystick would commonly plug in.). You only need a new sound card if the sythesized samples don't come near enough to your ideals. That is, does a violin sound something similar to a real violin? You need better software if you find your creativity limited by the number of tracks you can create, difficulty in entering notation. Cakewalk certainly has its fans. From discussion on another forum, it fails as a full-feature notation program, but jazz muscision like it for creating charts from which to practice improvisation. Band-in-Box is even easier to use for this limited purpose. For full-featured notation, you would want something like Finale or Sibelius, which cost hundreds. Both are excellent, but Finale leads the way in setting standards. What sort of purpose do you have in mind? MidiStudio is about $50, i think, and makes all sorts of sounds. It has an editiing program where the sequencing output can be tweaked graphically or numerically.
| response 7 of 15: |
Sep 4 14:07 UTC 2003 |
Re #6: A few points: A serial port and a joystick port are different. I think the confusion comes because some sound cards use the joystick port to carry MIDI signals, and you can also buy MIDI adapters that plug into a serial port. The two things are seperate, though. The quality of your sound card's samples only matters if you're using the sound card itself as a MIDI output device. If you're connecting your keyboard's MIDI interface to the computer, the samples that matter will be the ones on the keyboard. You can also get "software synth" programs to play MIDI using their own sample banks, instead of the ones built into the sound card or keyboard. MIDI is a bit confusing until you realize what exactly it is. A WAV or MP3 file is like a cassette tape recording; it contains a digitized recording of a particular sound. It sounds basically the same no matter how you play it. MIDI is more like a player piano roll; it describes the music in terms of notes and durations, and it's up to the MIDI output device to actually turn them into sounds. How the result sounds will depend on what device it's played through. That device can be a chip on a sound card, a software program, a keyboard, or anything else that can make music. There have been MIDI-controlled pipe organs. There's even a propane-powered organ that's controlled through a MIDI interface. (See http://www.lhpo.org/)