[CM] midi to sound file

Noel Bush noel@x-31.com
Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:51:59 -0400


Thanks for your reply, Dave.  I found your tutorial to be very
interesting.  Unfortunately, I haven't yet dived into CLM, and although
I gave it a brief shot, I must admit that I grew impatient and kept up a
search for a simpler way.

As for TiMidity, for some reason I'm not able to compile it with Alsa
support on my machine.  And I can't find documentation on how to create
the soundfont configuration files, so I'm not able to use my favorite
soundfonts in any case, and I don't like the patches that come with the
program.

So my solution, in case anyone else is interested, ultimately lay in
using ecasound, with a very simple command line like this:

ecasound -i /dev/dsp -o ec3.aiff

Of course this required me to manually start the recording process a
little before the midi player, but it captured the sound perfectly and
was essentially what I was looking for for this pretty simple task.

The choice of AIFF was important, because in the case of WAV, for
instance, the format mismatch between /dev/dsp and the apparently
unchangeable settings for WAV resulted in no success.

I know this looks really trivial, but it took me a long time to find the
answer, so I hope it will help someone else!

On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 09:32, Dave Phillips wrote:
> Noel Bush wrote:
> 
> > Very simple: I want to capture the sound produced by MIDI playback into a soundfile.
> > [snip]
> > I'm sure I must be missing something very elementary here.  Out of this
> > whole wonderful collection of software, there's got to be a very simple
> > way to accomplish this.  Can anyone help?
> 
> Hi Noel:
> 
>   I've used two different approaches. One is to create simultaneous
> output (use the CM seq object) for MIDI and CLM, with the CLM output set
> to go to a soundfile. Another way is to write a script for TiMidity to
> convert the MIDI file. Both methods have worked fine for me. I've taken
> the liberty of attaching a tutorial I wrote for the AGNULA project, the
> last part of it might give you some useful ideas.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> == Dave Phillips
> 
> 	The Book Of Linux Music & Sound at http://www.nostarch.com/lms.htm
> 	The Linux Soundapps Site at http://linux-sound.org
> 
> Currently listening to: Harold Budd & Brian Eno, "Wind In Lonely Fences"