midi to wav/mp3

[kalniel]

Can anyone recommend a good, free, workflow for rendering audio from a midi file? I'm primarily interested in good brass instrument sounds but all the free simple tools I've come across (musescore, audacity etc.) sound awful. I started to look into the world of DAWs and VSTs but quickly got lost down a rabbit hole of plugins and account creations for stuff that is more than I need.

[Kumagoro]

I'm not going to pretend I know much about this sort of thing but from looking up trying to get a decent midi piano sound you need to get a plug-in that has been made using recorded real instruments and then uses those waveforms to reconstruct them. This is how things like digital pianos work. They seemed to require money when I last looked them up.

If it was just to do a straight playback of a score maybe you could go into a piano shop and see if you can playback via USB and have it convert it. I'm not sure how easy that is my digital piano had a floppy drive it is that old. If you wanted you could send me the midi file and I could record the output to give you an idea of how it might sound.

Note high end digital pianos do hundreds of instruments not just piano.

[g8ina]

I used to do a lot of this, and IIRC I used Audio Compositor and a bunch of soundfonts, which are basically sample libraries.

BUT that was a LONG time ago, dont even know if its still available. There are loads of much more modern tools, like MOTU which Wendy Carlos used.

[Saracen999]

all the free simple tools I've come across .... sound awfu

I think the nub of your problem is exemplified by that.

As the midi file is really little more than a text file with a set of instructions, anything you use has to convert those instructions to play .... whatever, a saxophone .... into an actual saxophone sound. And just as giving a sheet of music score and a dirt-cheap sax to a novice saxophonist is not going to result in concert-grade music, nor is it likely (and certainly not very predictable) with either cheap/free software or even cheap hardware unless you can find one of those open source type of projects created and supported by real enthusiasts. It may exist, but if it does, I don't know of it. Short of that, you'll either need good-souding software or good sounding hardware and the latter is very unlikely to be free, and probably not cheap.

If you do come up with a solution for one would like to know, just to file that away in the back of my mind somewhere. If anything free exists, it'd be interesting to play with.

But beyond the above, which I'm pretty sure you already knew anyway, I'm at a loss for ideas. Other than, find some willing person with a good midi device that can play the midi file(s) and connect it's audio output to either the audio in on your PC or, better if dearer, a good audio interface, and some recording software like Audacity, etc. The trick will be finding that person with the good midi device.

Good luck.

[g8ina]

https://www.fmjsoft.com/awavestudio.html#main

https://www.polyphone-soundfonts.com/

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/det...di_player.html

https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth

https://www.abyssmedia.com/midirende...i-to-wav.shtml

http://www.synthfont.com/

plus soundfonts :
https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/

That should keep you occupied for a while.