mid  is short for midi,  or musical instrument digital interface.  It is a
set of instructions to allow a computer to PLAY an instrument (real or
digital).  It does not actually contain sounds. So using something to
convert it to an actual sound file will of course make it a lot bigger. I
think I used to use Timidity to play those? Though often now the midi
standard is just used for control interfaces. I have a midi keyboard that
allows me to manipulate the BioTek synth module in Waveform (from
Tracktion).

Phil W

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 6:58 PM Joe Lowder via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

> Please help ...
>
> After searching the 'net for information about
> which audio and video formats are best, and why,
> I am more confused than ever.
>
> On my system, I came across some old audio files with
> the file-name suffix .mid but I could not get those
> files to play with vlc, smplayer, amarok, or audacity.
>
> So, I went to several online file conversion sites
> trying to find one that would work best to do some
> file conversions, and that confused the subject further.
>
> So, I'm hoping that the PLUG brain trust can provide
> better information about this.
>
> The only file conversion site that I found that could
> deal with the .mid files was: www.zamzar.com
>
> When I converted one of my files, music.mid to mp3,
> the file played fine, but it increased the file size
> from 6329 to 3163566, which seemed weird? Why so?
>
> ------6329 Apr 12  2003 music.mid
> ---3163566 May 11 19:41 music.mp3
> ---3362836 May 12 00:28 music.ogg
> --37962478 May 12 00:29 music.wav
>
> I also gried to convert the same file to .ogg and to .wav
> with the size results seen above. This makes no sense.
>
> Why would such a small source file be blown up to such
> huge sizes and all sound the same?
>
> Similar question about video files:
> 46235648 Jul 18  2018 workshop2.VOB
> 16811516 Jul 18  2018 workshop2.mkv
> 51575152 May 12 00:14 workshop2.mp4
>
> Which of these three is a preferable format?
> The all seem to look identical (to me) when played.
> Why would the conversion from the original VOB to
> mkv become so much smaller a file size and why
> would the conversion from VOB to mp4 increase the size?
>
> Hope so someone can help me make sense of this.
>
>
>
>
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