Help for a wannabe MIDI composer.

[E-109 Omega]

Hi all. Well, after listening to some great MIDI's that I have, I've decided that I'd like to try my hand at it. Problem is, I don't even know the first thing about it, I can't even read a musical score. So, my question is, anyone know of some good software that can help me compose one, and some sites that can show me what the heck I'm looking at when I look at musical scores? I already know of one program, Sibelius, a friend turned me onto it. I pretty much use it now to play MIDI's, just so I can see the musical scores.

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm asking for a lot.

[Marik]

You're asking a lot there. There's a lot to that. Plus MIDIs sound outdated. Get a loop based program like Acid, you can make real music with that.

[Mr. G]

For sheet music composition, I use Finale. Not only is it a bit over to top, with hundreds of options (plus a few extra hidden that you probably will skip over, unkowningly), but, once you print the page out, it actually looks better. Silibus puts way too much space, and the markings aren't nearly as thick as they could be, whereas a finale page looks fuller, but it comes with a hefty price tag. The full version is around $480, so it's not intended for the "Hm... I want to try this out" crowd, but if you want to go into a musical career (teaching, writing, etc..), then that is an excellent piece of software.

However, you're not going after sheet music here, you're going more for the midi creation. As much as I like to beat the crap out of midi, it has one thing that nothing can surpass it: filesize. a 3 minute midi can be around 30 k, a 3 minute mp3 at about 128 kbps will go for just under 3 megs. But, the biggest advantage also becomes the biggest disadvantage, because it's up to the machines how to interprite it, because it specifies notes and lengths of notes, and a suggested instrument. they can interprete it in millions of ways. With mp3, FLAC, wave, ogg vorbis, etc, which use volume and frequency/pitch, the only loss of data is a hint of compression. If you can, I would say look for a program that can export in .mp3 (Finale is one that does it, but that's way over the top, plus focused for an entirely different audience)

[Ingolme]

I have a lot of MIDIs, but all I do is recompose videogame music, I don't make up my own songs.
I use Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.0, I'm not sure where you can get it from though.
I'd like to get on with real sound though, I've seen many people who know how to compose actual audio sound rather than midi but I don't get an answer when I ask them what program they used. Can anybody tell me?

[E-109 Omega]

Sorry about the bump/late reply. Hey, thanks for the info guys.