MIDI and WAV Files
MIDI
MIDI stands for Music Instrument Digital Interface. It's a standard
for transmitting musical
information between electronic instruments and computers. MIDI is
only able to produce music from
sound boards, which means that you cannot expect to hear human
voice or the noise of dog bark from
the MIDI files. However, the size of a MIDI file is small, and it
doesn't take much disk space. The
quality of music is very good. A MIDI file has an extension .mid.
WAV
This is an extension for Wave Form Audio File Format. WAV is also
called RIFF WAVE format. It is a
Microsoft Windows sound standard. WAV files are sound data - digital
representation of an analog signal,
which are different from MIDI files that contain no sound data but lists
of commands for MIDI devices.
Therefore, WAV files are huge data files that take great amount of disk
space. You need one megabyte
disk space to play music for only one minute. A WAV file has an extension
.wav.
Andy's Computer World
MIDI AND WAV FILES / Andy Blackburn / andy@g-net.net / Revised December 7, 2003