How do I hook up Midi?

[titoandswan]

I have been working for years with a Yamaha MD4s 4 track digital recorder. Now I am interested in working through it onto my PC to make more tracks available. I'm wondering if, through the use of the midi jacks in the back of the recorder, if there is a way to record 4 tracks simultaniously to my computer. Truthfully though, I know nothing about using midi, so as much help as possible would be great.

[AlChuck]

It sounds, from your choice of words, that you might be thinking that MIDI is a form of audio data like WAV or MP3 or OggVorbis (I've been waiting a long time to use that word in a sentence). It's not. MIDI data is performance data -- it describes the performance, but is not an audio record of any sound that might have been happening while the performance was going on.

But you can record MIDI data while you record a number of audio tracks, then later record to audio what a MIDI synth does when you send it the MIDI data.

The number of individual audio tracks you can record simultaneously depends on the number of input channels on your audio interface and on the computer you're using. Most modern computers can easily handle large numberd of simultaneous audio data streams. 4-channel soundcards are available starting at around $200 and 8-channel ones starting at around $500...

[Porter]

If you are looking at increasing the number of simultaneous tracks, you could use this, however there is a bit of work to get everything fully into the PC.

As I couldn't find any detailed info on your recorder this is all speculation... You might be able to use MIDI to 'sync' the computer and the Yamaha. What you can do then is record to both the PC and the Yamaha at the same time (so assuming you have a stereo card on your PC a total of 6 individual tracks), then later you would have to transfer them onto the PC via rca cables or the like so each track was individual. Mind you, in doing this you would be adding another D/A -> A/D conversion of it which would reduce the quality of the audio.

Other option is if there are 4 inputs on this, you should be able to use it as a mixer and record 2 tracks down to the computer.

I'm assuming posting in this forum you have Cakewalk software and are looking at integrating both?

Daniel