Audacity is a free audio recording and editing program, that’s mostly used as a simple
audio editor.
It’s great if you need to record a microphone and maybe clean up background noise.
In this video, we’re going to push the limits of Audacity, and see what it’s capable of
when working with MIDI files.
Let’s first cover what MIDI actually is.
MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface, and it’s basically just a standardized
communication protocol that any MIDI instrument, such as a keyboard or electronic drum kit
uses to communicate with another system.
A MIDI clip that’s saved on an instrument track in a digital audio workstation isn’t
actually a sound file.
It’s just a set of instructions that’s sent to a different program.
That program then uses those instructions to make sound, either by synthesizing it from
wave generators, using samples, or a combination of both, to put things really simply.
Each MIDI event would have a time value that it starts at, and a value on the keyboard,
such as the note that you’re playing.
There’s also usually a velocity setting as well for how hard you hit the note.
All of this information is used to basically just tell the instrument plugin in our software
what to do, and from there it creates the sound that we can then edit like any other
audio.
Alright, so now that we know what MIDI is about, let’s get back to Audacity.
The reason we’re making this video is because Audacity does have some very limited MIDI
processing, and the Audacity manual hints at it being able to playback MIDI files.
Before we start, I think it’s important to recognize that Audacity is first and foremost
an audio track editing program.
You can connect a USB microphone to the computer, then use this software to record the audio,
apply a few effects, and export the audio as a file.
Its goal is not to work with MIDI.
This is just an additional feature that’s been added to some newer versions in a limited
way.
There’s a lot of audio editing tools in this program, but it works best for recording
a single track, and it’s not really well suited for multitrack recording, or editing
a lot of tracks and mixing them together into a song.
To work with MIDI in Audacity we have to add a MIDI clip that is recorded and edited in
another digital audio workstation.
We can export the MIDI clip to a file on our computer, and drag and drop it into Audacity.
All the MIDI clips used in Audacity must be created in a different program.
There is no way for Audacity to create a MIDI clip on its own.
You cannot connect a MIDI controller as an input device for recording, and there is no
piano roll to edit MIDI notes.
Without using some add-ons that just mimic keyboard commands, there’s also no way to
use a MIDI controller as a control surface to adjust the volume levels and panning in
Audacity.
Our MIDI device will basically not communicate with this program.
We’ll see even with this MIDI clip added, that there is no way to adjust the velocity,
timing or duration of any MIDI events in the clip.
We also can’t add or delete notes, or change the pitch to transpose it.
So there’s no edits that can be made whatsoever, besides cutting and pasting sections of the
clip to different positions, and sliding the entire clip along the timeline to a different
position and trimming, but I wouldn’t really consider that editing in any meaningful way.
To my knowledge, there’s also no good way to output the MIDI file in Audacity to an
external MIDI processor, like a MIDI keyboard, and then loop back the audio into the computer
and record the audio.
So we’re stuck using the built-in audio MIDI processor in Windows, which doesn’t
sound great at all.
Depending on your computer software, you MAY be able to get Audacity to playback the MIDI
file using the built in MIDI processor.
This is something I’m able to do on my system, which is running Windows 10.
When I play back the MIDI file, all I hear is a file playing through a generic electronic
piano instrument, and I can’t find any way to change that, such as running it through
a different instrument or a third party instrument plugin, so we’re really limited with the
sound of this.
If you are able to get it to playback, you can then setup Audacity in Windows WASAPI
mode, set the input to your audio interface’s loopback mode, and the output to the audio
interface.
I’m not sure if this feature will be available to everyone, depending on their hardware setup.
This basically means that now Audacity will take the sound output from our system and
record it to an audio track.
We just have to press the record button and let it play through the entire duration of
the song.
We’re not able to speed this process up.
With digital audio workstations, the sound would be processed quicker throughout the
whole song and we wouldn’t have to wait for the song to play all the way through.
In Audacity, we have to wait for it to play through, then stop recording at the end or
it will just keep on going.
Now we just have an audio track with sound on it, and we can export that as an audio
file.
Since this is a loopback, it introduces some latency into the file.
What this means is that if we play it back again with the MIDI, it goes completely out
of sync due to the delay.
So the file is converted, but it’s delayed it time and would be useless if we’re working
with other audio tracks that were recorded alongside the original MIDI track since they
would now be out of sync.
Audacity also has an option to export a MIDI file from the project, but I see no reason
to use that feature, since the MIDI file wasn’t created in Audacity to begin with, and therefore
we already have the MIDI file on our computer.
Along with the limitations we’ve seen with MIDI in Audacity, I’ve also experienced
frequent crashes in the software as I was making this video with MIDI.
This tells me that this is not something that’s yet fully supported in Audacity.
Overall, it looks like it’s been a few years since there has been any substantial progress
in implementing MIDI in Audacity, and it’s likely not a priority for the developers of
this software, so we shouldn’t be expecting to see any big changes in the near future.
On a completely different note, this doesn’t mean Audacity can’t be used with a MIDI
keyboard, as long as that MIDI keyboard has built in instruments and is able to send out
an audio signal.
In that case, the audio signal would connect as an audio, not MIDI input, like any other
instrument or microphone and would record as an audio file.
This does mean that there would be no way to edit the performance after by adjusting
the timing and velocity of MIDI events, which is one of the big advantages of working with
MIDI in the first place.
So now that we’ve recognized that Audacity can’t do much as far as recording or editing
MIDI, it’s also important to know that there is a lot of free software that can be used
to do this instead.
We’ve done a full video on some of these programs and compared them so you can check
them out on this channel.
As a brief overview, some of the best programs that are completely free are SoundBridge,
Tracktion Waveform, and Cakewalk by BandLab.
These are all fully featured free digital audio workstations that can record MIDI from
a MIDI keyboard, edit MIDI on a piano roll or automatically with quantization, and convert
MIDI to audio using included and third party VST instrument plugins, so they’re a lot
better suited for this task than Audacity is.
Overall, if you’re looking to use MIDI, I would honestly recommend using one of these
programs instead, and just not waste any time trying to do this with Audacity, since that’s
not what this program is for.
For more information, we have full tutorial series on these digital audio workstations
on this channel as well that will help you get started with audio recording and MIDI
editing.
Let’s do a quick overview of how this can work in some other software, just as an example,
so you can see what a free full digital audio workstation is capable of.
For this, I’m using Cakewalk by BandLab, with the included SI instruments plugins.
In this software, I can create a dedicated MIDI instrument track.
This is a MIDI track that’s connected directly to a virtual instrument so it outputs sound
to our master channel.
One way to make MIDI in this software is to draw all the notes out on the piano roll with
the draw tool.
We can select the length of the notes, adjust the snapping, and create chords.
We would also do this in the same way to create our drum beat.
We can also connect the MIDI controller.
For this I’m using and AKAI MPK249 which is a 49-key 16-drum pad MIDI controller with
faders and control surfaces as well.
With the MID controller, we can record the MIDI on the track as we play the keyboard,
and have all our notes inputted that way.
From there, all the notes can be edited manually on the piano roll.
Both these methods of adding MIDI cannot be done in Audacity.
So overall, in order to use MIDI in Audacity, you would need to use software like this to
begin with in order to create the MIDI file, then export it and import it into Audacity,
only to get less usability.
From this video, we know that Audacity can somewhat play these clips back, but it’s
probably best to not bother with any of the MIDI features in this program.
Thanks for checking out this video on the MIDI capabilities of Audacity.
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