Transfering MIDI Audio Files to Audio CDs

I had a question from Frank Lindholm, who subscribes to my email newsletter, recently, and who asked:

i have many songs i recorded to a floppy disc (midis)
is it possible to copy those to a c/d for a c/d player?
frank


Unfortunately, Frank won't be able to burn the audio CDs directly from his midi files.

Midi files do not store the music in a format suitable for burning an audio CD. He will have to use some sort of conversion program to go from the midi format to the WAV format, before he can make them into an audio cd.

I doubt that any of the CD-burning programs (Nero, Roxio, etc) have conversion utilities to convert MIDI files to WAV files.

What's the next step? Do a Google search for midi to wav conversion software. There are a number of options that show up in the Google search. Some are probably free.

Not only is there a different way in which the music data is stored, data compression is also an issue. WAV files are not compressed and take a lot of space, while MP3 and MIDI are very compressed.

A WAV file takes about 600MB per hour, while an hour of MP3 is usually about 10% of that. An hour of MIDI is tiny -- I'd be surprised if it was even 1MB.

So, remember, one audio CD = one hour of sound. One data CD of .wav files = one hour of sound. One data CD of MP3 files = about 12 hours of sound.