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Rendering MIDIs with Audio Compositor

Wednesday, 5 April 2000
By Scott Mitchell

Check out this tutorial on rendering MIDIs with Audio Compositor.

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...Continued Rendering MIDIs with Audio Compositor

Audio Compositor is a professional-quality MIDI file renderer and software wavetable synthesizer. It provides a graphical environment for editing instrument samples and patches, and in most ways its organization resembles that of a traditional MIDI module.

Audio Compositor is a:

  • MIDI-to-WAV file renderer suitable for professional applications
  • multitimbral realtime software wavetable synth
  • sophisticated patch editor which understands SoundFonts, DLS and Kurzweil files, and Audio Compositor's own powerful instrument bank format
  • file converter for all of the types listed (Kurzweil is readonly)
  • librarian for your sample collection in .WAV format

How To Render a MIDI File

1. Finding an instrument bank

To render ordinary General MIDI files, Audio Compositor needs an instrument set. If you don't plan to design your own, many complete General MIDI sets can be found as free downloads on the Internet.

Rendering a MIDI file with Audio Compositor is really very simple. What sometimes confuses newcomers to the program is the need to supply an instrument bank for use in the rendering process. The default "bank" that comes with Audio Compositor contains only a single instrument--the classical guitar sound used by AC's long-outdated "Leyenda" demo. Thus, it's not much use when rendering garden variety MIDI files which require sounds from the full set of General MIDI instruments.

Fortunately, complete instrument sets are easy to find on the Internet, most often in SoundFont (SF2) format. Our Links page lists many sources, and a simple web search for "SoundFont" will turn up many more. Look for a single SF2 file identified as a General MIDI or GM set. Audio Compositor also reads instrument banks in Downloadable Sounds (DLS), Kurzweil (KRZ), and native Audio Compositor (ACP) formats. At this writing, SoundFonts are of the most interest to beginning users, simply because they're the most common.

If you're wondering why we don't simply package an appropriate SoundFont with Audio Compositor, read on.

2. Opening the MIDI renderer

Open the MIDI file from Audio Compositor's File menu.

Armed with an instrument bank, you're really only a few clicks away from rendering a MIDI file with Audio Compositor. First, open the MIDI file you want to render from the File menu. The display will look something like this:

The yellow region represents the MIDI file, with tracks displayed as horizontal bars (you can click to select tracks in this area, or drag the start and end points, if you don't want to render the whole file). Just above this is a toolbar; the first button on the toolbar starts the rendering process. The tabbed area at the bottom controls various aspects of the rendering operation: any changes here will typically be made before you press Start. We'll look at some of these next.

Continue to Setting input options

Audio Compositor is a professional-quality MIDI file renderer and software wavetable synthesizer. It provides a graphical environment for editing instrument samples and patches, and in most ways its organization resembles that of a traditional MIDI module.

Software author Scott Mitchell's site can be visited at http://home.att.net/~audiocompositor/

 
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