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Making MIDI Sound Better; A simple guide to making MIDI sound good
Topic Started: May 9 2013, 10:24 PM (40 Views)
Q2DM1
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Here is a very simple guide to making MIDI sound better. For the tl;dr version, skip to the list below.
MIDI is a communications protocol. It is an acronym which means "Musical Instrument Digital Interface". Think of a piano MIDI Keyboard, like the Casio SA-76. MIDI instruments rely on synthesizers to produce sound. This is because MIDI - in itself - contains no actual sound. Those keyboards scan the keys to test which ones are pressed. Based on this information, the keyboard creates some commands using the MIDI protocol. These commands are sent to a synthesizer (or a program that simulates a synth). The synthesizer then translates these commands to sound through the use of "soundfonts". Soundfonts are individual files that has a ton of smaller files inside. The smaller files are PCM sound samples of instruments. The soundfont containing these files use a process called "mapping". This is where each sample represents a specific note of a specific instrument. When the synth looks for a note for an instrument, it looks at the map. It can then pull up the requested file to produce the sound.

If you ever played a MIDI file in Windows, you will have noticed that half the instruments sound terrible. Windows uses an emulation program called "GW Synth" for its translator. This program uses a DLS file format for its soundfont. And the included font is small - just a few (~5) MB. This implies that there aren't many samples inside. A good font will be upwards of 100+ MB or more. But not many people produce DLS fonts. They produce SF2 fonts.

SF2 is a file originally created for a line in the Sound Blaster series soundcards (I can't remember which line). They were downloadable files that could be loaded to the card itself. The card had its own synthesizer for MIDI instruments. There are ways for you to use these SF2 (which stands for "Sound Font version 2") files without the intended soundcard. This is where the simple guide comes in.


  • Install Timidity++ (I recommend the full suite, but you only need the driver) NOTE: you need administrator privileges and disable system protection
  • Get a soundfont (Titanic is popular, but it's a five part download [until I make a torrent for it] at 275 MB)
  • Configure Timidity to use the downloaded font
  • Configure programs to use the Timidity++ driver


The difference is amazing.
Lets play a round of "What the heck Can I Build Using Things that Only I Would Have Lying Around": Coming soon
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