What is the diffrence between midi files and wav files?

Answer 1

Midi files are much much smaller than wav files.

In a midi, the instrument is stored electronically and then things about how the notes were made are played back. A wav is just raw sound, everything is recorded. If for example you pull a track off a music CD, the format of it is really WAV.

Happy listening.

Answer 2

The primary difference is that a wav file is an audio file which is either uncompressed or uses a lossless compression for encoding. Usually audio CDs use this format along with the .cda format. Midi files are audio files too, but they don't contain the musical notes. Instead they only contain commands. Using these sommands, the file can control the audio hardware on the computer or any compatible system to play the music.

To explain it in layman's terms, a wav file is something like listening to a pianist play a piano. With the midi file, you can get rid of the pianist and only include the commands for what keys on the piano need to be played to generate similar music as the wav file.

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Answer 3

A MIDI file is a file with instructions for the sound card to reproduce sound using timing and frequency. You can open, edit, and create a given MIDI file using any text editor, ie. Notepad, if you translate the binary instructions into text first, using software available on this page: http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/progs/software.htm .
A WAV file, on the other hand, is a container for uncompressed digital audio. Unlike MIDI files, which are just instructions and thus can sound different depending on your MIDI playback device and soundfonts, WAV files will generally sound about the same on any playback device. they are also a lot larger than MIDI files, as they do not contain instructions, but static time-ordered audioframes. Where a MIDI file may have a simple instruction like "play C for 10 seconds on violin" where the actual waveform for C on the violin is left up to the MIDI playback device, a WAV would have to fill every millisecond of that 10 seconds with the digital waveform that occurs within each millisecond (no compression algorithm is used).

Answer 4

A midi file contains instructions that tell your computer how to play a song using the instruments available on the midi card in your computer. Think of it as "sheet music" for your PC. A wav is an actual digital recording of the sounds. Because CD players (and MP3 players) do not have midi instruments in them, they can not play the "sheet music". They have to have the actual recorded sound (either wav or mp3) to play them.

Answer 5

Midi are instumental files. while wav files records all frequencies of voice.

Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.midi)
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.midi) is commonly used for computer keyboards and other computer-based musical tools. MIDI files contain musical notes, rhythm notation and other information often needed by a composer.


Waveform Audio (.wav)
Waveform Audio (.wav) is a common file format. Created by Microsoft and IBM, WAV was one of the first audio file types developed for the PC. WAV files are defined as lossless, meaning that files are large and complete; nothing has been lost. Professionally recorded CDs are also a lossless audio source.

In contrast, the three audio formats listed below are lossy-redundant and non-auditory data is removed to allow for more compact storage; in essence, some data has been lost. This process of removing data to shrink the file size is called compression.

The three file formats below must begin with a lossless format-such as a store-bought CD or a computer WAV file-then compress it. Most lossy formats boast little or no detectable change in sound quality. But because each compressing format selects the deleteable data differently, converting one compressed file into another lossy format will sometimes result in lower quality audio. Again, always start with a CD or WAV file, then compress.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MIDI AND WAV FILES?
With WAV (or Real Audio) files, you are actually taking the sound waveform and plotting its points as digital numbers in memory or disk. The number of points is the "sampling rate", that is to say, "samples" are taken at a certain rate (11KHZ, 22KHZ and 44KHZ)*. The higher the rate, the better the quality and the more bits per number, the more accurately it is sampled (16 bits as opposed to 8 bits). Real Audio is some compressed form of WAV file which makes Real Audio files more compact. (Admittedly, I don't know alot about Real Audio). Recently Real Audio has gone to a new version and improved quite a bit. Real Audio has made it possible for radio stations to be heard on the web. Anyway, with those files you are actually making a digital recording on your disk as if it were an audio CD.

RealAudio is a trademark of Progressive Networks.

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a whole different can of worms. With MIDI, the sounds are "pre-recorded" on your sound board. You could hook up a MIDI keyboard to your sound card and play the sounds out of it. A MIDI file contains no sound data at all. It contains messages as to which sound on your board to play, how long to play it and how loud to play it. There are also MIDI messages that play NOTHING (rests). That's why MIDI files are so compact. MIDI is analogous to a player piano. The MIDI file is like a piano role with holes in it. In fact you can buy a real piano (YAMAHA, for instance) that is controlled by a MIDI, hook it up to your computer and with the right kind of messages, the computer would play your piano.

If you go to a musical instrument store, you can buy MIDI sound modules and keyboards which you can hook together.

Some MIDI boxes or boards can also sample sounds in which case you can actually sample the sound into the box and then play it. So, you could record a thunder noise into a midi board or box, but instead you are storing it in such a way that it is actuated by a MIDI message. You could actually record thunder or other sound into a MIDI sampling box, then play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in thunder notes, dog barks, sneazes or whatever.

So, MIDI files are very compact because they are using sounds that are already stored and simply activating them. It's been awhile since I worked with MIDI, so it's probably gotten even more sophisticated. This is a simplified explanation of MIDI which may suffice for most people, but I have found a page called Introduction into MIDI By Eric Lipscomb if more detail is desired.

* Why were the sampling rates 11KHZ, 22KHZ and 44KHZ chosen for WAV files? Because the very limit of human hearing is about 18-20KHZ in pure sin wave, so they pushed it to 22KHZ, then considering that a wave has a positive and negative swing, double the sampling rate to 44KHZ to sample both positive and negative swings and that is what is optimal. 22KHZ and 11KHZ are compromises to save space, but quality is lost. The other factor is MONO or STEREO. Stereo files would be twice as large.

Answer 6

wav files are recordings, midi files are digital information that allows the notes to be played on different device using different voices.

Answer 7

Wow. I didn't know you could! Midi is a keyboard, and wav is pure sound.