MIDI Vs AUDIO

[BB]

Ok i have a rough understanding of how midi works but i dont get audio, help please anyone !

differences, prefrences, any general info

[hongteck]

most people here know how audio works but know noths about MIDI :-)

[AlChuck]

First time I've seen this question! Like hongtech sez, usually the confusion's the other way around!

Audio is like what's on a tape, or an LP, or a CD -- it's a recording of actual sound, transferred through some electromechanical/eletcronical magic into a stored form that can be played back again and again... Digital audio is a digital representation of sound waveforms, which is great because it can be so readily manipulated, sliced, diced, combined, copied, and so on...

[dragonworks]

Digital audio is much more difficult to manipulate than midi. Midi is more flexible, you can change the pitch, time, duration, attack and most other midi parameters of any indiivual note. With digital audio it is far easier to manipulate than analog audio. With digital you can copy and paste, merge, etc but not on the level you can with midi. The problem as I see it mixing midi and digital is you have to have the midi sound human. It is better to get the midi tracks down with the human feel, then lay down the digital. You dont want that mechanical sound
(maybe you do) it is almost impossible to play in time to a near perfect computer track and very difficult to take a perfect timed midi track and "swing" it to "live" musicians.

[bball jones]

I have been composing, and arranging in midi. When I have a decent song foundation in midi, the next thing I do is try different midi patches to see what sounds I like. After I have gotten a new piece this far, then I will start recording audio. A nice thing about working this way is, I always have the chord progression and changes stored in a midi file which can easily be retrieved at any point in the future.