More songs in Synthesia

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aria1121
Posts: 1505

Post by aria1121 »

I posted this for people who actually don't have much experience about Synthesia and the 'music-world', and want more songs to play in Synthesia

Synthesia comes with a packet of songs out-of-the-box. But playing the same song over and over again is kinda boring, so you probably want more songs, selfmade or it doesn't matter.
The kind of files you are looking for is called MIDI. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. To exactly know what a MIDI is, you have to know something about audio files.

Some info
You very probably know what a MP3 is. It's a small form of audio. Wave files (ends with .WAV) are files that ARE the audio. It contains the audio that needs to be played, so your computer sets it to a sound wave out of the speakers so you can hear it.
MIDI files are different. MIDI's are actually files that contain notes that the computer have to play. So, in other words, MIDI files are only the notes of a song (or any other audio). That's also a reason why the filesize of a MIDI is much smaller (approx. 10KB) than a MP3 or WAV. A MIDI file is built out of one or more tracks, each one instrument with a max of 32 (an 1-track MIDI we is MIDI-FORMAT#0 and one with multiple tracks is MIDI-FORMAT#1)
The computer also has to know how those sounds should sound like. For this, you have a SoundFont (ends with .SF2 and a compressed one with .sf2Ark). You don't need to worry about this, your computer has already one built in (at least I hope so. Windows has one, and Mac too. I'm not sure about Linux).

Now how in the world do I get more MIDI's in Synthesia?
You can download MIDI files easily from the internet. Just google the name + MIDI (e.g. Zelda's Lullaby MIDI or Zelda's Lullaby MIDI download) from sites like CoolMIDI, mididb and HamieNET.
Post: MIDI Song Sources

Ok, I've downloaded one, what next?
Now place the MIDI in a logic place, like on your desktop, in your Documents folder or etc...
Open Synthesia go to Play > Manage watched folders > Add new watched folder... Now browse and find the folder where it is. Now choose Watch Folder (Only set-up MIDI's in the folder) or Watch Folder and Watch All Its Subfolders (The folder and all subdirectories within). Now it should be in the list.

I can't find the MIDI I am searching for on the internet!
You can always download the MP3 or WAVE (is better) format. Just find the internet (or on YouTube, copy adress link and goto mediaconverter.org, paste link and download as WAV file then download). Now download'n'install SUPER (see resources near bottom my post). Drag'n'drop it to the drop-spot and then, at the top of the windows by Output hit WAV and by the green thing PCM 16 little endian (or something like that). Now it should be converted and placed on your computer, the place where you have the convert-file. Download'n'install AmazingMIDI. Open it up and by Input select browse and find it, the same for Tone Input. Click the transcribe butoon up there and you should get a sort of MIDI. Split the tracks in Anvil Studio (see Resources).

How can I make my own MIDI's to play with Synthesia?
You can download MuseScore to create simple MIDI's. To edit them (that's what I use them for) you can use Anvil Studio.

Karaoke
Karaoke files (ends with .kar) are actually MIDI files too, but with lyrics built-in. Synthesia can play KAR-files, but doesn't support the lyrics yet. You can vote for this on the Feature Voting.


Resources
SUPER (Windows) : http://www.erightsoft.org/GetFile.php?SUPERsetup.exe
AmazingMIDI (For Windows) : http://www.pluto.dti.ne.jp/~araki/amazingmidi/
Mediaconverter (Online) : http://mediaconverter.org
MuseScore (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, PCLinuxOS) : http://www.musescore.org
Anvil Studio (Windows) : http://www.anvilstudio.com

Note This page is very incomplete. For more info I refer to the Synthesia Wiki.

Any problems, suggestions, questions, post it underneath and I'll try to help you (excluded for finding MIDI's on the internet)
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