Technical Details
How I Record
How I Make MIDI Music
Music is fairly easy to get out of your head when you have a computer with the right tools. It’s definately easier than sitting in front of a piano with a blank score sheet. First you need some kind of notation software, and most of the ones available today are pretty good. The most popular is probably Sibelius, which is more oriented to making music that looks good on paper. Finale is similar (and if you want a decent little notation application for free, you can’t beat their NotePad). A great (and open source) solution for Linux systems is Rosegarden, which is free and uses the excellent (and also open source) LilyPond music typesetter.
Of course, I don’t use any of those. A long long time ago, I got this program called Cakewalk for Windows 3.1. Since then, I’ve upgraded a few times, and its particular style of entering notes has stuck with me. I can’t really bring myself to use any of the other programs—they just get annoying after a while. And Cakewalk Pro Audio 7 (which I now use) is a great sequencer and multi-track recorder as well.
To record them to files that you can listen to, I just use Audacity, a great open-source general-purpose audio editor, to record from the MIDI Synth line on the soundcard. The sound samples used on the soundcard greatly affect the quality, so I like to use the best possible. The Creative Live! series cards (and anything later; Audigy, Audigy2, etc) use a system called “SoundFonts” to let you use custom sets of samples, and there are a lot (both commercial and free) available. The best General Midi (GM) soundfont I’ve found is called “Airfont” or A340. You can get it here if you have a Creative soundcard. The file is huge, and it take a lot of system resources (memory) to use it, but it’s the next best thing to an actual recording when one isn’t possible.
Sound Formats
This subject is so dear to my heart that I’ve devoted an entirely other page to it. Very other. Go read it and be enlightened.