Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Audio VS. Midi Files.

First, It is important to clarify that both are digital audio files, and the main difference is the way they produce sound.

In this text, I will list their basic characteristic and also its advantages and disadvantages and making the right selection between both for specific uses.

I will start by explaining basic concepts, and then I will do an analisys of both.

Analog Audio. analog comes from analogy which means similar. In music, it refers to the transformation of an acoustic signal in a medium such as air, to a voltage signal traveling in a copper wire. This voltage is an analog representation of the acoustic signal. When this voltage is conducted for example to a speaker, the signal is converted back to acoustic signal. Probably the most common device used to convert an acoustic signal to analog is a microphone, which detects the acoustic waves in the air, and then converts them in electric impulses.

Digital Audio. In the digital world, numbers are used to represent a digital waveform. An audio signal is represented in digital memory with a binary code that stores a massive amount of numbers that are used to represent a signal. An ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) is a computer chip that is used to convert an analog signal into digital information. This process is called sampling and has changed the world of sound in a dramatic fashion. Digital audio data is the actual or presentation of a sound, stored in the form of thousands of individual Numbers.

The three sampling frequency most often used in multimedia our CD-quality 44.1 KHz, 22.05 KHz and 11.025 KHz. Sample sizes are 8 bits or 16 bits. the larger the sample size, the better the data describes the record sound.

MIDI Audio files. MIDI means musical instrument digital interface. MIDI is a communication standard developed in the early 1980s for electronic musical instruments and computers. MIDI files is a list of time-stamped commands that are recordings of musical actions. MIDI files tend to be significantly smaller than equivalent digitized waveform files.

MIDI Files Advantages:

• MIDI files are much more compact than digital audio files.
• MIDI files embedded in web pages load and play more quickly than their digital equivalent.
• MIDI data is completely editable. A particular instrument can be removed from the song and/or a particular instrument can be changed by another just by selecting it.
• MIDI files may sound better than digital audio files if the MIDI sound source you are using his of high quality.

MIDI Files Disadvantages:

• MIDI playback will be accurate only if the MIDI playback device is identical to the device used for production.
• MIDI cannot easily be used to play back spoken dialogue.
• working with MIDI data requires familiarity with musical scores, keyboards, notation, and audio production.
• MIDI data is device dependent (the sounds produced by MIDI music files depend on the particular MIDI device used for playback).

Digital Audio Advantages.

• In general, the most important advantage of digital audio its is consistent playback quality.
• Digital audio is used far more frequently than MIDI data for multimedia sound tracks.
• The preparation and programming required for creating digital audio do not demand a knowledge of music theory.
• Digital audio data is not device dependent (digital audio produces sounds that are more or less identical regradless of the playback system).
• A wider selection of applications software and systems support for digital audio is available for both, the  Macintoch and Windows platforms.
• Digital audio can handle spoken dialogue.

Digital Audio Disadvantages:

• Digital audio won't work if you don't have enough RAM, hard disk space, CPU processing power or bandwidth to process it.
• Digital audio files are bigger than MIDI files.

Examples of both audio formats:

This is the theme of the old series Magnum PI in both Formats:

Magnum.wav     330KB

Magnum.mid        12KB