WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MIDI AND WAV FILES?
With WAV (or Real Audio) files, you are actually taking the sound waveform and plotting its points as digital numbers in memory or disk. The number of points is the “sampling rate”, that is to say, “samples” are taken at a certain rate (11KHZ, 22KHZ and 44KHZ)*. The higher the rate, the better the quality and the more bits per number, the more accurately it is sampled (16 bits as opposed to 8 bits). Real Audio is some compressed form of WAV file which makes Real Audio files more compact. (Admittedly, I don’t know alot about Real Audio). Recently Real Audio has gone to a new version and improved quite a bit. Real Audio has made it possible for radio stations to be heard on the web. Anyway, with those files you are actually making a digital recording on your disk as if it were an audio CD. RealAudio is a trademark of Progressive Networks. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a whole different can of worms. With MIDI, the sounds are “pre-recorded” on your sound board. You could
