How to record MIDI, part 4: Playing your MIDI recordings
February 25th, 2008Red Dot Forever can only play what you just recorded, it cannot load existing MIDI files. To play MIDI files, use any of these programs:
- Windows Media Player (already on your computer)
- VanBasco’s Karaoke Player, a great program that also has an on-screen keyboard, can slow down or speed up the playback and transpose it. Click for detailed instructions
- MidiNotate Player, which shows the MIDI data as sheet music.
If you like to fiddle with sheet music notation, you’ll find that most notation programs can also import MIDI files and convert them to sheet music. However, unless you played perfectly in time, you’ll need to perform some manual cleanup to make your score look good.
Synthesizers
As I mentioned before, MIDI is just information about which notes to play. To turn MIDI data into sound, you need a “synthesizer”.
A synthesizer can either be a hardware device — such as your digital piano or keyboard, or other MIDI-capable equipment such as a special “sound module” — or a piece of software.
Your computer comes with a software synthesizer. It’s not a very good one, and it is the reason why many people don’t like the sound of MIDI files. On my computer it is called “Microsoft GS Wavetable Software”.
If you choose this as your MIDI Output device in Red Dot Forever (or in any other program), MIDI music will be played back through this built-in synthesizer.
NOTE: If you don’t hear anything, make sure the synthesizer is not muted in the Volume Control Panel. On my computer it is called “SW-Synthesizer”.
Windows has a control panel for “Sounds and Audio Devices”. The “Audio” tab contains an option for setting the device that will be used to play back MIDI music.
By default this is set to the software synthesizer, but you can also choose your instrument’s MIDI ports here. From then on, any music player will play MIDI on your instrument.
Usually that I what I do: first I record my playing as MIDI on the computer, then later I’ll use the VanBasco player to play these recordings back on my digital piano.