Re: rendering MIDI files to WAV/MP3

Hello Simon,

I'm no expert, but I hope following will help you:

As you know, midi is a very tiny music-format, because it basically does 
not contain a -real- sound (ok, there exists a 
midi-sample-dump-standard, but it is not very public (to slow,...)).
So Midi only says: Oh, please play a piano sound...

Now there are at least 2 possibilities the sound could be played:

1. There is a sample-memory (often rom) on your soundcard, which 
contains some audio-samples for each midi-instrument. The midi language 
triggers that sound and the soundcard plays it (at audio-output).
Memory is expensive, so cheap soundcards have not much of it (which 
causes that the sound isn't so good).

2. The audio-data for each instrument is at a other place (disk, ram) 
and will be send to soundcard from a special software, which is 
triggered by the midi-data. The advantage is: you can use the 
audio-sounds you did enjoy - with high qualitiy (if you have much disk 
or memory space...)
I think soundfont is more like this, but it needs special soundcard...
For information on soundfont see:
	http://www.soundfont.com/faqs.html#wherespec

A very public converter is timidity:
	http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/timidity/

By the way, if we search for a perl-way:
Perhaps you will examine the perl-posibilities at www.cpan.org/. If 
there isn't something for your need, maybe you want to create such a 
converter by yourself?

Hop I could help a little...

Bye,

Markus