Instruction Manual

1200 Beginner’s Guide to Cakewalk Software
MIDI
different programs. You can record MIDI music as slowly as you want, and
then change the tempo in your software to play it back at any tempo you
want. Audio files, however, can only play back at approximately the same
tempo they were recorded at without drastically altering the sound quality.
It’s easy to edit and transpose MIDI files, since they are so small and you’re
just editing commands, not actual sound. MIDI files can be printed out as
standard musical notation or lead sheets. It can be harder to make MIDI
music sound as natural as audio. If you don’t record MIDI music in real
time, it can sound mechanical. Some MIDI instruments, especially some of
the acoustic-sounding instruments such as brass, strings, and guitars that
you find on the built-in synthesizers of low-priced sound cards, sound
artificial. However, percussive sounds usually sound quite good on MIDI
instruments, and are much easier to record than a real drum set. You can
also play back MIDI data through any number of hardware or software
samplers that use recordings (samples) of any instrument you can imagine
as sound sources.
For more information, see:
MIDI Channels, Interfaces, Inputs, and Outputs
MIDI Drivers
MIDI Files, Projects, Tracks, and Clips
Controlling Which Sounds You Hear
MIDI
Audio
Audio Hardware (Sound Cards) and Drivers
MIDI Channels, Interfaces, Inputs, and Outputs
Most MIDI instruments can play at least 16 different sounds at the same
time—instruments that can play more than one sound at a time are called
multi-timbral (pronounced multi-tambral). In order to control which sounds
respond to which commands, MIDI messages are marked with a channel
number from 1 to 16. That way a MIDI sound module, such as a drum
machine, can tell which messages are meant for which of the sounds it is
capable of playing. Each instrument has a limit to the number of notes it can
play at one time, counting all the notes it is playing on all the sounds it is
using combined. That number is usually between 32 and 128, and is called
polyphony.
You need some way to get MIDI messages into and out of your computer,
so a MIDI system needs a piece of hardware called a MIDI interface, which