Convert MIDI files to mp3 easily
MIDI files aren’t very portable or easy to share. And yet we’d love to have them to hand, so we can listen to them whenever we want, on a PC, a USB stick, our smartphone or in the car.
It goes without saying that we’d like a quality conversion that uses our favourite sound bank.
In short, the ideal would be to be able to convert our MIDI files into MP3 files…
It’s possible and quite easy.
The solution exists and is probably already available to you!
If you’ve installed Coolsoft’s VirtualMidiSynth synthesiser, you should know that it includes a MIDI to MP3 (and even WAV and FLAC) file converter!
How does it work?
You need to have installed Coolsoft’s VirtualMidiSynth beforehand (see the chapter on « Improving MIDI sound »)
When you launch Karaboss, VirtualMidiSynth is also automatically activated without necessarily being visible.
However, it is visible in the Windows taskbar.
Click on its icon, and the following menu will appear:
Click on the ‘MIDI File Converter’ menu
The following window will appear:
Click on the ‘+’ button to select the file to be converted and choose the conversion format (mp3, flac, wav) from the drop-down list.*
Small problem: WAV conversion is not a problem and works straight away, but MP3 conversion does not….
Conversions to MP3 and FLAC require conversion libraries to be downloaded and added.
These libraries are not included when VirtualMIDISynth is installed, for licensing reasons.
However, installation is easy and guided by VirtualMIDISynth.
mp3 conversion
For licensing reasons, VirtualMidiSynth does not deliver the mp3 conversion library (LAME).
Once you have selected the MIDI file to be converted and clicked on the ‘Start conversion’ button, the following message appears:
Click on the ‘OK’ button to display the LAME library download page. (https://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php)
Download the ‘zip’ compressed file corresponding to your configuration (generally ‘LAME 3.100 64bit’ if you are running Windows 10 or higher)
Uncompress the file from where it was downloaded. You should obtain two files ‘lame.exe’ and ‘lame_enc.dll’ as well as a ‘doc’ directory that you don’t need to keep.
Simply copy these two files into the ‘C:\Program Files\VirtualMIDISynth\encoders’ directory as indicated in the message.
That’s it, your encoder is ready to convert your MIDI files to mp3 format.
You’ll notice that the conversion is very fast and that the result is of the same quality as that interpreted by Karaboss, VirtualMIDISynth and your sound bank (of course, it’s the same tool).