Ableton Forum

Hey everyone,

So I downloaded some midi files and tried to insert them and get no sound.

Here are some pics of the settings. Not quite sure what I'm doing wrong here....

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/w80umvictd6o ... kkb7a?dl=0

Thanks!

Beau

See that clue at the bottom where it says "Drag an Instrument or Sample Here"?

Basically you have notes without an instrument to play. Fix that and things will work.

ding, ding, ding!! lol ty ty! I'll let you know

Of Course that was the answer! I just thought since I could listen to it in my media player it would work. That's what I get for thinkin'!

Thank you SO much!

Beauknowsdiddly wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 21, 2021 4:46 am

Of Course that was the answer! I just thought since I could listen to it in my media player it would work. That's what I get for thinkin'!

Thank you SO much!

Helps to know some of the basics of how things work. MIDI is just a text document basically, like sheet music, it is the instructions for how to play which I am sure you know. Your media player probably has what is called a "General MIDI (GM)" engine which is either a wavetable or FM synth that covers the 128 midi instruments so a MIDI file will produce sound when it is played as it has a "band" of instruments that suit the MIDI files... Web browsers such as Chrome also have this so MIDI files will play and back in the old school days of computers, sound cards had GM built-in and many games used MIDI as the music for the game (Doom, Duke Nukem.... ah the good old days).

Ableton is not a GM application, it uses MIDI to operate, accepts MIDI files, sends MIDI signals since MiDI is just a protocol but does not have a default GM engine to produce sounds mainly because that is your job to design and create all of that so you have to add whatever suitable instrument you want on a track for a MIDI file.

So yes you can load in MIDI files but you need to assign instruments to each track the file may import manually.