How To Make Midi Files Sound Better on Windows with SoundFontsMIDI Files are a form of music akin to sheet music. Notes are stored rather than the sounds they make and leave the sound to a synthesizer.
MIDI is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect various electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and is an international standard.
MIDI files store the individual notes much like sheet music, which shows what notes to play and in what order. MIDI files do not have a say in how the music is played or what it sounds like, unlike WAV and MP3, in which the actual waveform is stored. MIDI files were commonly used as game soundtracks in the 80s and 90s due to their small file size. A tune that is 5 minutes in length could be 2k as stored in MIDI or 5-6MB as an MP3. When CD audio became common on multimedia PCs, and later storage capacity increased, MIDI files fell out of popular fashion in favour of CD-quality audio.
Since MIDI files store the notes that need to be played, they can be edited in a MIDI editor. This allows musical compositions to be edited, effects to be changed, and key or tempo to be changed. You can change the instrument from a piano to a xylophone. This is all impossible to do with a WAV or MP3. Midi Files are played through a synthesizer, which converts the notes into sounds.
What is a MIDI File Synthesizer?
MIDI files require a synthesizer to convert musical notes into something you can listen to. Various platforms and hardware have different synthesizers, meaning the same MIDI file played on one device could sound different on another. To solve this, systems use a set of standard synthesizers. A synthesizer contains a digital audio recording of all the instruments in the MIDI standard at specific octaves. The synthesizer will use these recordings to convert the MIDI notes to audio.
The Synthesizer built into Windows is called "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth" and is quite basic. You can hear an example of MIDI in the video file recording at the end of the article. Another well-known synthesizer is the "YAMAHA XG SoftSynthetizer".
We can change how the MIDI sounds by changing the recordings used to generate the audio. We can do this by loading a SoundFont into the synthesizer so it will use a different set of note recordings. Some SoundFonts contain all the instruments (general SoundFont), or they can provide updates to specific instruments or provide highly specialized instruments, such as replacing organs with more piano types, special effects, drum kits, etc.
Some advanced Sound Cards (such as my old SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold) have a dedicated hardware MIDI synthesizer into which you can upload a SoundFont. You can also use a SoundFont synthesizer emulation program in Windows. Either way, loading a SoundFont will improve the quality of MIDI files played using Windows.
Making MIDI Files Sound Better with SoundFont Emulation
For Windows, we can use a tool called VirtualMidiSynth. This tool creates a new synthesizer in Windows that you can use to load SoundFonts and play MIDI files at much greater quality.
Once you've finished installing VirtualMidiSynth, open the program's configuration. This is a window that will look something like this.
You must first change the "Default MIDI Out device (MIDI Mapper)" from Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth to CoolsoftVirtualMIDISynth.
Once that is done, we must provide the program with a SoundFont. You can find a list of SoundFonts on the CoolSoft website, or you can Google them. I prefer the SGM-V2.01 SoundFont. Don't forget to unzip the files. The SoundFont has a .sf2 file extension, not .zip or .7z.
Comparison of Various SoundFonts on Same MIDI File
A comparison video shows the difference between Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth and SGM-V2.01 playing the same MIDI file.
