Forum Overview :: No Stairway to Heaven :: Think of MIDI like a programmer.

[quote name="Fullofkittens"]It's tempting to think of MIDI as a sound file format especially because back in the 90s soundcards treated them that way. But they're really just a dumb standard text file format, like a json file. They contain a bunch of serialized events that your DAW has to deserialize into what it can play back as "music" (though MIDI files are also used for things like controlling stage lights and Xmas light displays). So when Ableton and Reaper don't play a MIDI file by default it's because they're like, ok, we can read this file but we don't know what you want to do with it. We know you want to play...notes...at...times...but using what? Back in the day there was a concept called <i>General MIDI</i> which was an attempt to improve the MIDI standard by standardizing patch positions so that you could predict that Patch 1 was a piano and Patch 41 was a violin. (Soundblaster cards subscribed to General MIDI and could "play MIDI files.") That standard has been abandoned and Live explicitly does not support it. So if you import a MIDI file into Live you're going to see a track that has note and timing information but no sound assigned to it. Live has a concept called <i>Instruments</i> which you can click and drag from the Library and those will play whatever is on that MIDI track. Live comes bundled with some Instruments of its own and if you buy and install third-party VSTs those will also show up as instruments. The ones that come with the free version of Live sound cheap; you can buy Packs from their website or upgrade to Ableton Live Suite to make them sound better, or as I said before NI Komplete will sound pretty good. So for Ableton, open your MIDI file and it will deserialize it into one or more Tracks with midi clips on them. Open the Instrument Library and drag sounds from those onto those MIDI tracks and then hit play on the clips, and you should hear sounds from your computer. You can also make Live control your synth controller but as I said before that is a bunch of cabling and configuration; it's not very complicated but you will have to understand the fundamentals of the MIDI standard and how Live implements it, plus hook up both audio and MIDI cables.[/quote]