Post by keyboardman on Feb 13, 2004 6:58:24 GMT -5
My question in a nutshell is that I want to get my piano to sound right when I play back a midi piano piece in Timidity. Because I'm brand new to everything about midi, I'm not sure what you might need to know to help me with my question, so I will probably give you more detail than you need, but here goes:
Computer is brand new, fast with lots of memory. I have an M-Audio Firewire Audiophile (MAFA) connected to the computer. Connected to the MAFA is my digital piano (by midi cables). The piano also has analog RCA line-out cables running to the analog input jacks at the back of the MAFA. (The piano has only keyboard instruments to choose from, but they sound great.) Finally, the MAFA's line out is connected to my speakers. That's the setup. I'm no guru on this stuff, but it seems to me that the crappy soundcard that came with this computer has been cut out of the picture completely by this arrangement.
Sound is excellent using the setup I have just described and there's no latency at all that I can detect from piano to speaker output. As I'm sure you know, with this arrangement and a little tweaking in Control Panel, I can make the computer use the synths already installed in the piano instead of the tinny junk that you get in the midi synths that come with Windows XP.
Alright, the next thing is that I have become more and more interested in what people can do with midi creating full orchestral arrangements. Your pieces and the samples you posted (your own and others like 76 Trombones and the Christmas piece) and others I have listened to have shown me that it's possible for me to do this without having to buy a decent soundcard (the MAFA tapped me out) and even more importantly, if I am understanding what I have read all over your Timidity website tonight, it's possible for me to use downloadable soundfonts even without a soundcard (as I explained above, I don't think my soundcard is even being used by the computer since I installed the MAFA and connected the piano and speakers to it).
So, I downloaded and installed Timidity tonight, which was completely hassle-free, by the way. Then I followed your instructions for downloading and installing SFpack and the Big Merlin soundfont, and I went into the soundfont.cfg file and made the changes to that file as you instructed. All of this was hassle-free also. (I do think you might consider explaining in those instructions what it means "to comment" in that cfg file.)
Then I opened Timidity and opened a midi file in there. The sound is really pretty amazing to me on some orchestral pieces. All the MIDI files I played sounded clear as a bell, no static or hiss or muffled sounds.
I opened one of my own MIDI piano compositions and played that. I opened the Console from the menu and confirmed that the piano sound that I was hearing was from the Big Merlin soundfont and it was ('merlin_pro42.sf2').
Here's the problem: The playback of my own MIDI piano pieces has a lot of static and just doesn't sound quite natural even behind the static. I played with adjusting the volume in Timidity and in the three places where I can fool with the volume settings in the MAFA's UI. I can improve the sound by doing this but can't eliminate the static and what I guess I would have to call the distortion. And yet all the MIDI pieces I played from your site (which of course, were MP3s converted/rendered from MIDIs) sound great. My own piano songs sound great when I play them back in WinAmp 2.91, Windows Media Player and PowerTracks ProAudio (my inexpensive sequencer).
If you have any suggestions, I would appreciate knowing what they are. This is an impressive software program -- it appears to be able to do exactly what I have spent several hours online these last few days trying to figure out: whether there's some way for me to use piano soundfonts (and even other instruments) without a soundcard and without have to use the poor piano synths that came with the computer. I am willing to fuss with this a long time if it will allow me to do what I think it will.
One other (short) question: When I am finished playing one MIDI piece in Timidity and go to File/Open File to load another piece, Timidity just plays the one that was already loaded. I have to close the program and open it again to clear the first song. Am I missing something here?
I promise to keep any future posts to a small fraction of the length of this one.
Thanks.
Computer is brand new, fast with lots of memory. I have an M-Audio Firewire Audiophile (MAFA) connected to the computer. Connected to the MAFA is my digital piano (by midi cables). The piano also has analog RCA line-out cables running to the analog input jacks at the back of the MAFA. (The piano has only keyboard instruments to choose from, but they sound great.) Finally, the MAFA's line out is connected to my speakers. That's the setup. I'm no guru on this stuff, but it seems to me that the crappy soundcard that came with this computer has been cut out of the picture completely by this arrangement.
Sound is excellent using the setup I have just described and there's no latency at all that I can detect from piano to speaker output. As I'm sure you know, with this arrangement and a little tweaking in Control Panel, I can make the computer use the synths already installed in the piano instead of the tinny junk that you get in the midi synths that come with Windows XP.
Alright, the next thing is that I have become more and more interested in what people can do with midi creating full orchestral arrangements. Your pieces and the samples you posted (your own and others like 76 Trombones and the Christmas piece) and others I have listened to have shown me that it's possible for me to do this without having to buy a decent soundcard (the MAFA tapped me out) and even more importantly, if I am understanding what I have read all over your Timidity website tonight, it's possible for me to use downloadable soundfonts even without a soundcard (as I explained above, I don't think my soundcard is even being used by the computer since I installed the MAFA and connected the piano and speakers to it).
So, I downloaded and installed Timidity tonight, which was completely hassle-free, by the way. Then I followed your instructions for downloading and installing SFpack and the Big Merlin soundfont, and I went into the soundfont.cfg file and made the changes to that file as you instructed. All of this was hassle-free also. (I do think you might consider explaining in those instructions what it means "to comment" in that cfg file.)
Then I opened Timidity and opened a midi file in there. The sound is really pretty amazing to me on some orchestral pieces. All the MIDI files I played sounded clear as a bell, no static or hiss or muffled sounds.
I opened one of my own MIDI piano compositions and played that. I opened the Console from the menu and confirmed that the piano sound that I was hearing was from the Big Merlin soundfont and it was ('merlin_pro42.sf2').
Here's the problem: The playback of my own MIDI piano pieces has a lot of static and just doesn't sound quite natural even behind the static. I played with adjusting the volume in Timidity and in the three places where I can fool with the volume settings in the MAFA's UI. I can improve the sound by doing this but can't eliminate the static and what I guess I would have to call the distortion. And yet all the MIDI pieces I played from your site (which of course, were MP3s converted/rendered from MIDIs) sound great. My own piano songs sound great when I play them back in WinAmp 2.91, Windows Media Player and PowerTracks ProAudio (my inexpensive sequencer).
If you have any suggestions, I would appreciate knowing what they are. This is an impressive software program -- it appears to be able to do exactly what I have spent several hours online these last few days trying to figure out: whether there's some way for me to use piano soundfonts (and even other instruments) without a soundcard and without have to use the poor piano synths that came with the computer. I am willing to fuss with this a long time if it will allow me to do what I think it will.
One other (short) question: When I am finished playing one MIDI piece in Timidity and go to File/Open File to load another piece, Timidity just plays the one that was already loaded. I have to close the program and open it again to clear the first song. Am I missing something here?
I promise to keep any future posts to a small fraction of the length of this one.
Thanks.
