hi mike,
sherry,
thank you for the quick and informative reply. I have enjoyed playing along with the elementary band but will try to step it up a level or two
while i have you what is the difference between using a midi and a .not file? And xml is a whole other format as well? I imagine there advantages and disadvantages to each. My latest challenge is getting the repeats into the midis i don't print 5 pages for a part. I assume i'll find that soon. Just cut and insert repeat bars somehow? I have not seen any repeats in any of the midis i've downloaded.
Mike
you could think of the difference in soundfonts and other sound sources (eg. Synths, sound libraries, etc.) this way. Let's say you have the sheet music for beethoven's fifth. You take that sheet music and give it to your local elementary school for their fifth and sixth grade band to play. It may sound ok, but it's no great shakes. You then take the same sheet music to your local high school band. Sounds better. Take the same sheets to the local symphony orchestra (we're talking the folks with day jobs) and it sounds lots better. Now take the same sheets to the nearest professional orchestra (eg. Paid to play always musicians) and it will sound fantastic. They were all playing from the same sheets, but the difference in sound quality is tremendous
in the above analogy, the sheet music is like the .not file in our software (or the .mid that you can export). The gs wavetable is like the local elementary band - it gets the relative sounds out, but typically sounds more mechanical, lower quality, and no timbre changes and so forth. Soundfonts (aka, the high school/local symphony) can vary in quality of the sounds and "tweaking" capability (eg. Whether you can add some "breath" to wind instruments or not, plucking noise for guitars, etc.) really good libraries, like eastwest or garritan (aka, the pro symphony), allow you to add a lot of nuances to the performance to bring it more life-like during playback.
Most free midi-to-mp3 converters use either the gs wavetable or their own soundfont, which isn't typically a very high quality one.
[quote} i don't see an export to mp3 option in my composer software. [/quote} it's not there - yet
yes - kenneth explains what you'll need to do to set up mp3 conversion for free on your computer on his website (
www.synthfont.com)
it might be worth checking to see if your yamaha will record a wav file for you of what it plays. You may be able to put that on a memory stick or disk to then convert to mp3 using a free wav - to - mp3 program.
Ttfn,
sherry