This is very interesting and touches on something that I have had questions about. I have little technical knowledge of computers and learned about graphic programs and things like .jpeg compression on this list. I have a general understanding of this because it is easy to picture a pixel and how there could be different kinds of averaging of adjacent pixels etc. A few years ago I received the only existing copies of 8 or 10 cassettes of a band that had a local following in the 70's. I got the hardware and cables and put the cassettes in my old Harmon-Kardon cassette player and transmitted it to the computer, and used i-Sound pro, which is a great inexpensive program, and made some archival .wav files and lower compression .mp3's and sent it to the musicians and friends. I can definitely hear the difference with highly compressed music files. When I was puzzling over this, a friend who works in this said "There is nothing like a pixel in sound." So this really seems to be the deeper question- "What is sound? How can it be digitized? I never looked into it. Just now, was reading the Wikipedia entry about MIDI which seems very good- the section on "technical specifications" seems to be addressing this question. Just wondering if you have something interesting to say about this- the people on this list are very smart. ;-) Personally I was never a fan of MIDI, for example when Jerry Garcia was playing the MIDI guitar. Reading the Wikipedia article made some sense of this- basically the system allows one to sample a myriad of sounds of a certain amplitude or duration, I guess the mix of wavelengths and amplitudes reproduces what we hear as a sound or music, but there has to be a certain limitation on the number of samples- maybe a good musician playing an acoustic instrument has variations that just not are contained in the samples? Or was it just a function of the way it was used or the limited samples and technology back in the day. Kathy Roth Here's the link to the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI On 6/10/2015 5:40 PM, Hal Lane wrote:
Bill, You asked:
Does anyone know of a good, preferably free, .wav to .mid converter for Windows? There is no algorithmic way to perform this task -- hence there can be no program to convert .wav to .mid.
The crux of the matter is the extreme condensation of the .mid specification -- it is basically the name of an instrument; a specification of the note to be played and its duration. Multiple instruments and notes can be specified to be sounded simultaneously.
In contrast, .wav files are audio sound waveforms. The waveforms of multiple simultaneously-played sounds are added together resulting in their sum -- effectively representing a (digitally encoded) particular air pressure at any one instant in time in the .wav file.
Audio sound waveforms can be converted between different audio sound waveform encodings, like .mp3 .wav and .ogg . Here are a few hundred more: http://fileinfo.com/filetypes/audio
However, converting from .mid to .wav is easy. At every moment, in however fine a time slice is being used, each instrument's note's sound pressure is added to every other note playing at that moment. This sound pressure (or amplitude) is the value stored in the .wav file for that moment in time. The air pressures must be represented 10's of thousands of times a second in order to be able to encode and play back "faithful" sounds.
Sorry for the hurried, off-the-cuff description...
- Hal Lane
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-----Original Message----- From: Fractint [mailto:fractint-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Bill Jemison Sent: Wednesday, June 10, 2015 12:23 PM To: Fractint and General Fractals Discussion Subject: [Fractint] WAV -> MIDI converter?
Does anyone know of a good, preferably free, .wav to .mid converter for Windows? _______________________________________________ Fractint mailing list Fractint@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fractint
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