The Difference Between Audio & MIDI Data

Video Transcript

This is Jose Caban. MAC OSX, Reason, and Q bass are registered trademarks of their respective companies, and I am in no way affiliated with Apple, Propellerhead or Steinberg. Okay, now let's talk about the difference between MIDI and audio. Audio is a wave form. It's something that you typically relate to a voice that you've seen the wave form on that. MP3s. Anything that you've ever seen with a wave form is audio. And it really is just that. It's a wave that goes through the air and needs to be decoded by something. Whether it be a microphone, whether it be the human ear. Whether it's a speaker. Whatever it is, it's going to decode that audio wave form and put it into a sound. And that's where we get audio from. Now MIDI, on the other hand, is a language. Just on and off signal, digital language between two computer devices. So when I play a middle C on my keyboard, I hear it and you hear it as a middle C. It's audio. But, when I feed it into my computer - I can send it either through a microphone or through a line as audio, and it will be a middle C - or I can send it through MIDI. Now what MIDI's going to do, is it's an on and off signal. That's it. Its two computers talking. It's going to tell it. It's not telling it middle C. It's telling it number sixty - for argument's sake. Number sixty on. Number sixty off. Number sixty-three on. Number sixty-three off. So when I'm playing anything into the keyboard, I'm not really playing these notes in audio like you and I hear them. I'm playing, I'm telling the computer sixty on/off, forty-eight on/off, twenty-seven on/off, thirteen on/off, forty-nine on/off. And the computer knows to make those particular numbers on and off at what points, and that's what MIDI does. So, it doesn't matter if you're sending it to a keyboard, if you're sending it to a keyboard pretending to be a flute, if you're sending it to a program in your computer, if you're sending it to some type of sampling device. It doesn't matter what you send it to. When you send MIDI data, it's just on/off. It tells that device what to turn on and what to turn off. And that device decides how it's going to make that sound sound like what by you telling it what you want it to do.

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