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PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition
book

PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson
July 2003
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
874 pages
38h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

MIDI Audio

A MIDI file is the digital equivalent of sheet music. Rather than containing actual audio data, a MIDI file contains detailed instructions for creating the sounds represented by that file. And, just as the same sheet music played by different musicians can sound different, the exact sounds produced by a MIDI file depend on which sound card you use to play it.

Tip

Three PC MIDI standards exist. The first, General MIDI, is the official standard, actually predates multimedia PCs, and is the oldest and most comprehensive standard. The other two standards are Basic MIDI and Extended MIDI. Both are Microsoft standards and, despite the name of the latter, both are subsets of the General MIDI standard. In the early days of sound cards, General MIDI support was an unrealistically high target, so many sound cards implemented only one of the Microsoft MIDI subsets. All current sound cards we know of support full General MIDI.

MIDI was developed about 20 years ago, originally as a method to provide a standard interface between electronic music keyboards and electronic sound generators such as Moog synthesizers. A MIDI interface supports 16 channels, allowing up to 16 instruments or groups of instruments (selected from a palette of 128 available instruments) to play simultaneously. MIDI interfaces can be stacked. Some MIDI devices support 16 or more interfaces simultaneously, allowing 256 or more channels.

The MIDI specification defines both a serial communication protocol and the ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 059600513XErrata Page