MIDIs

[rubah]

I have this midi that I've listened to a bunch right? So I basically have its sound memorized, and now that I'm playing it on my laptop it's wrong :o Like some of the pitches are wrong, different parts are louder than they should be, for example. I can see the dynamics being a result of playing off of laptop speakers, but the pitches should be the same? Does OSX use a different default midi sound-font than XP? or am I just imagining it? :(

[Samuraid]

Each sound card (or brand/model) tends to have its own wave table of instruments. Some MIDI playback is even software rendered, so MIDI will sound different depending on the device or the software used.

[blackmage_nuke]

Do you mean pitch as in if you play them side by side theyre off key or as in the 'tone' of the sound is different?

If theyre off key then that shouldnt happen but being different tones sounds about right, espiecially if you use different operating systems which would use different synthesisers

[Momiji]

Do you mean pitch as in if you play them side by side theyre off key or as in the 'tone' of the sound is different?

If theyre off key then that shouldnt happen but being different tones sounds about right, espiecially if you use different operating systems which would use different synthesisers

Yeah, what he said. This is kind of weird. The pitch should still be the same. o_O

[o_O]

The pitch isn't necessarily going to be the same. Remember that if a piece of hardware is only an implementation of a concept. In this case, the sound card may have its own set of instruments, the output of which ultimately depends upon the frequency of the signal from the hardware. We could even expect there to be some variance in sound between two separate cards - if it were an older soundcard, for example, it would be reasonable to expect that it has a lower frequency depth resolution - or a lower number of different possible output frequencies. :p

In reality, it's just that different hardware implementations are not necessarily identical. And that's assuming that playback isn't affected at all by - as Samuraid said - the software renderer.