Alden Bates' Weblog
Feigning normality since 1973
Midi to Wav conversion
You know, I swear back in the early days of the internet if you wanted something like, oh, a program to convert a midi file into a wav file, you could just go look on your favourite FTP site and download a tiny DOS program which would do it. Does anyone else remember those days? Now it seems like all the programs on offer for doing this require you to fork out $25. WTF?
I wanted to convert a midi file to a wav file, so I took the following steps:
- Downloaded one of the many shareware midi2wav converters.
- Ran the installer.
- Ran up the software.
- Discovered that pressing ENTER in the software would quit out of it without prompting "Are you sure you want to quit?"
- Restarted the software, attempted the conversion, got a cryptic error.
- Figuring the previous attempt had locked some audio drivers, rebooted the PC.
- Reran the program - discovered that the cryptic error actually meant the target directory I'd specified didn't exist. Converted the file.
- Played the resulting output file, to discover that the shareware software had produced a 1 minute long, completely silent wav file.
- Uninstalled the software.
Is this is how software works these days? You download it, install it, and hope it works and doesn't deposit any spyware on your PC? Man.
I got the midi file converted in the end, thanks to a page which gave instructions on converting midi files to wav files using Winamp.
Posted June 19, 2007 9:51 PM
Comments
Hrm, the nearest I could find to that was a Storm codec, which only seems to play files, not convert them... Got a link? :)
Posted by: Alden Bates | June 20, 2007 11:19 PM
Not Storm, SUPER
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
(knew it began with an S)
Download link is at the bottom.
(All that said, not sure it can take midi's!)
Posted by: Thad Ritchards | June 21, 2007 7:16 AM
I agree with you totally. Sometimes it just seems like we have done quite a few back steps during these last years. But then again, these days for most people entering a DOS command would be way too much hard work. :)
At first I usually try to find some plugins for the software I already have installed. That means that when converting sound files I try to locate a Winamp plug-in. If it doesn't work I also end up downloading some fishy software packed with who knows what...
BTW, if you are by any chance interested in link exchange, you can drop me a comment at http://photo-blogging.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Marko | June 22, 2007 1:16 AM
There's a fairly comprehension package I got ("Storm" seems to be it) that's freeware and seems to convert any and all media formats to any and all media formats. (The only thing I could find to convert .flv to .avi.)
Posted by: Thad Ritchards | June 20, 2007 9:25 AM