I was wondering if anyone has expirience with using the yamaha softsynth to take a midi and record it to a wave? i have been trying to get it to sound right but I seem to lose a lot of rumble in wave form. I really want to change some of the midi's to wav before the softsyth expires ;p.

Hummm... I think it would be feasible to use Winamp for that task.

You can configure in_midi to use the Yamaha Synthetizer engine, and write the output to wave with out_disk.

I would believe the quality would be the same as playing MIDIs through XG player.

Regards;

Roberto.

That is exactly what I do I set the midiout to the yamaha engine then I send it to output.

And the quality is bad neverthless?

Are you setting out_disk correctly? (PCM 44100Hz, 16bit, Stereo?)

it is set on that. Am I suppose to check convert to format?

Hummm.. dunno.
Plain weird

you can try setting your soundcard to record midi, playing the midi with winamp, while you record with a different program. I've used that technique a few times with success with my sb live. but with a softsynth I'm unsure if it would be the same.

Yet another possibility is Total Recorder:

http://www.highcriteria.com/

RTFM, all of you!
http://www.blorp.com/~peter/midihelp/

i was wondering when peterp ["a fricken plugin programming prophet"] was going to steer you right.

;-)
mike

I used to use WinGroove and thought it was pretty good. Dont know how it compares to the other alternatives tho. Sorry don't have a link for it.

i used wingroove too, but it's rather dodgy, especially on recent windows OS's. i've been able to record sound from microsoft's and yamaha's midi synths using in_midi *without* going through soundcard/sampling (using DirectMusic drivers).

Yes it was quite a strange program. Last time I checked it out, it added another MIDI thing (mapper? device drver?) to the system. So when I droped a mid file into winamp it played through using wingroove. I've never really been a midi person, but I was very impressed with the output.

http://www.wg7.com/en/

hehe i still have my old good Yamaha SW60-XG card. so much better than any softsynth....

Thanks for all the help guys I'll look into some of these things you talk about here.

I also found a WHQL-certified Yamaha SoftSynth on Microsoft's Corporate WinXP Update site. It just installs like any other driver through the "Add New Hardware" wizard. No word on whether or not it expires, if ever (probably not). It has 4MB sample set, and a reg hack is needed to set polyphony from 32 to 128.

Look for a Yamaha sound driver with a filesize of 3.9MB.

Yamaha could get upset about this one...I never though of MS as being involved with the distribution of warez, if that's indeed what this is.

Maybe the rumble is being lost in WinAMP because the EQ is on? If that's the case, turn it off.

I followed Peter's Winamp recording instructions faithfully, but the DirectMusic stuff is grayed out when I use any but the Microsoft MIDI software. Thus, I can get a WAV file as rendered via the MS synth, but, although a file of the same size is produced, the WAV from YamSynth is total silence. The MS version is nowhwere near so good as Yamaha's. (I wish I could get that MS/Yam synth -- would it work in WinMe?) I think I saw somewhere that one can play the file through YamSynth and have CoolEdit record it. But, can someone reassure me that that will work before I fritter time on that not-so-simple program? My free days from Yamaha are dwindling! BTW, Timidity++ for Win does this quite easily, but I'd say it is even lower quality than the MS synth I have.

Speaking of old cards, i own a real Roland Sound Canvas board (SCC-1) since 1993, (if i remember correctly, the price was near 400US$). I have noticed that since win98, there is a "microsoft synthetizer" thing that can be used for midi playback. This is a soft Sound Canvas very much like the old Virtual Sound Canvas. The GS logo is displayed in the info panel. I can say that the samples do sound pretty much like those on the real board, _but_ there is a lot of stuff missing. Among things, all the reverb/chorus effects are missing, and many sound sets are not present at all.

Anyway, to the point. I will try to explain things a little bit, because its natural that most don't get this MIDI thing at all

Not all MIDI files are equal, quality varies very much, because most are custom tailored for specific sound boards / midi modules. Some are very simple, some are complex, some use many instruments, some use different techniques to achieve the same. An early attempt for standarization emerged and was called GM (General Midi), its like a default basic that manufacturers agreed to. Before it, even basic sound instrument positions were different (example, in GM drum sets are supposed to be in part 10).

On top of GM, Roland made GS (kind of extension for GM) and later Yamaha introduced XG, another extension. For this reason, there are midi files custom tailored for, GM, GS, XG, and more recently, "Super Sound Canvas" (SC-88 and newer roland modules).

Because i have a real board, i could try an analog recording of a certain midi file, and maybe you can compare it with your midi reproduction to see if they are the same.

Hint! Hint! Warcraft II CD audio music was actually Roland SC-55 MIDI recorded!!! I have the midi files to verify it

Most ppl at the time had FM synthetizers, that were misused as cheap MIDI devices (something for which they were *not* designed to do). And could never enjoy the real music most games from 93~98 had in them. Oh, and there was the net, how godly impressive people's compositions are! You should check out the Sound Canvas User Group (SCUG) compos And, there are so many Classics! hehe.

BTW: Some roland modules (and the card i have) had this cool bug where you could do real overdrive/distort effects by tricking the reverb/chorus system (the Sound Canvas Pipe Organ Project exploits these

Is there a timidy for windows?

Ahh, the SW60! That's the card that got me started with sequencing and computer based music-making. Don't have it around anymore, but I do have a Yamaha MU90R soundmodule that has pretty much the same sounds in it. I remember how impressed I was the first time I heard it in the music store, playing regular midi's through a decent set of speakers. Coming from a SB32 on the dodgy computer speakers, it was a revelation. [Where's the nostalgia-smiley when you need it?]

/ Uosdwis

I also had a problem with not hearing anything, and I noticed at the time that there were 3 entries in the MIDI device list for this Yamaha WDM software synth, 2 of which have an open parenthesis after them (I had two soundcards installed at the time), and the third one had none. Something is messed up someplace, as is the case with most WHQL-certified drivers. Try 'em all until you find one that works.

To get a recorded wav of a software MIDI synth you have to catch the bitstream coming out of the MIDI synth (a la Total Recorder, http://www.highcriteria.com) or you have to have a soundcard which allows passing the wave back through the driver to recording software (be sure that Windows sounds are off--Total Recorder comes in handy here as well). Wave-only cards like the Terratec EWX 24/96 and the M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 that have the Envy24 chipset can do this. I think Creative cards can as well with the 'What U Hear' recording input (I'm not sure about that as I don't have one of those.)

The Winamp in_midi plugin is also capable of rendering/saving to .WAV (provided that the soundcard drivers support it) if Total Recorder is out of the question.

There's other, better ways to do it, but since my soundcard doesn't resample or do evil things to the audio, I just capture it that way since I haven't had much luck with other methods.

Also, doing some things in Windows Explorer that invovles fancy visuals (such as windowshade effects) will cause this driver to temporarily cut out and skip.

The Yamaha MIDI "drivers" on the XP Corp. Update site are WDM and *should* work with basically any recent Windows OS such as Me, 2k, and XP. 98 and 98SE *might* work (I used to use WDM soundcard drivers on 98 original without major problems, though performance was not very good due to NT kernel emulation.) If you can't find them on XP Corp. Update, PM me--I have the .CAB file.