Introduction to MIDI and Computer Music: Exercise 3

Exercise 3: Mix down and burn

The final stage of your electronic music-making process is an audio CD or MP3 file. To make either of these, you need to produce a stereo sound file that contains a mix-down of your entire Digital Performer project. This exercise gets you comfortable with some of the process before you have to do it for your Final Project.

What we're trying to do...

Take one of your projects that has Korg MIDI tracks, and mix it down to a stereo file.
You can use projects you made for Assignments 1 and 2, or any other MIDI sequence you've made. It just has to have MIDI tracks that you've arranged for the Korg to play.
IMPORTANT: For now, please don't use audio tracks or Reason MIDI tracks. For your Final Project, you will find additional instructions for mixing down a sequence that contains these tracks alongside Korg MIDI tracks. That's a much more complicated process.
Make an MP3 file of your mix.
If you want, burn your mix-down file to an audio CD.

What to turn in...

An MP3 file of your project. Name this file "exercise3.mp3," and put it in your folder on the Music Server.

Recording Korg Audio

When you're playing Korg MIDI tracks, Digital Performer doesn't know how they sound. Your sequence contains only MIDI messages, not the audio waveform produced by the Korg in response to these messages. To capture the Korg audio, you must record its audio output into the computer.

You can record Korg audio on only some of the stations in M373: all the stations against the west wall, which have the larger keyboards (#27-#31), all the stations in the next row (#19-#26) and one station in the next (#11). Please report to me any problems you have recording.

First, follow the instructions on the Recording Triton Audio web page to do the basic recording. Then come back to this page, and do the other tasks described here.

Exporting the Stereo Mix File

You now have a stereo mix soundbite that contains the sound made by the Korg when you played your sequence. This soundbite actually refers to two sound files, because Digital Performer uses split stereo files instead of one interleaved file. Split stereo means that your stereo mix is split into a pair of mono files, with '.L' (left) and '.R' (right) suffixes. Most other software likes to see interleaved stereo files, in which the individual sample numbers for the left and right channels are interleaved.

You must convert your split stereo soundbites into an interleaved stereo file, in order to write your mix to a CD or create an MP3 file. Here's how to convert...

Open the Soundbites window (type shift-B), and click on the name of the stereo mix soundbite to select it.
Choose Export Selected Bites from the Soundbites window mini-menu.
Choose a location for the file (e.g., the Desktop), and set Format to AIFF format. Then press Save.

Making an MP3 File

To find out how to convert your interleaved stereo mix file into an MP3 file, read these instructions.

Drop your MP3 file — named "exercise3.mp3" — into your folder on the Music Server.

Burning an Audio CD

To find out how to copy your interleaved stereo mix file onto a blank audio CD-R, read the instructions at the top of this page, under the heading, "Burning an Audio CD." This part of the exercise is optional, but you really should know how to do it.