Converting MIDI to MP3 via a command line tool?

I'm looking for a Windows command line tool that converts MIDI to MP3. I've found a tool called "Free MIDI to MP3 Converter" which does a good job, but I prefer a command line tool, since I want this conversion to be a part of a batch script that activates several tools.

I think timidity's command line tool can do this.

Timidity can only convert to WAV, and from WAV you need another tool to convert it to MP3- too much quality loss, plus, it's pretty clumsy to make Timidity work on Windows.

I've heard that those MID to MP3 converters have always been inefficient and gave results with very low yield/unsatisfactory results.

Try this one.

If you're on Linux and have both Fluidsynth and LAME, you can do it all on the command line in one go:

fluidsynth -r 44100 -R 1 -E little -T raw -O s16 -i -l -F - [PATH TO YOUR SOUNDFONT] [PATH TO THE MIDI FILE] | lame [your lame options here] -r --signed -s 44100 - [MP3 FILE TO WRITE]

Some of those options probably aren't needed, but that's the basic idea.  Fluidsynth dumps the audio to standard output as a raw PCM stream, which is then piped directly into LAME via standard input.

4 hours ago, Mike800 said:

I'm looking for a Windows command line tool.

If you have 20$. This (Total Audio Converter) will do the trick.

I have 20$, but not for this :)

@Mike800

Lol, I'm sorry, I missed the word "Windows". There should be a way to do that same thing on Windows, but I'm not as familiar with cmd.exe (and even less with PowerShell), so I can't say how. I usually use Bash on Windows :-/

3 hours ago, Mike800 said:

Timidity can only convert to WAV, and from WAV you need another tool to convert it to MP3- too much quality loss, plus, it's pretty clumsy to make Timidity work on Windows.

Recording to WAV doesn't induce any quality loss. It's a bit tedious, yes, but it's no worse than a program that would encode MP3 directly from synthesizing the MIDI.

Yes this is all cool and good But is there a MP3 to MiDi converter that doesn't sound like ass? 

8 hours ago, MrD!zone said:

Yes this is all cool and good But is there a MP3 to MiDi converter that doesn't sound like ass? 

I don't think there's a way to prevent that, at least not now. By converting an MP3 to MIDI you're basically asking a machine to guess what instruments are in an audio file.

SoX is cross-platform, never used it but it seems to be the only viable result from my Google Search other than the converter you already found.

http://sox.sourceforge.net/

Beware when downloading stuff from Sourceforge, some software coming from there these days is accompanied by toolbars and bullshit apps that try to sneak in through the installer. Guess SF needed money, anyway I hope this is of some help.

Sox cannot convert MIDI files.

18 hours ago, everennui said:

If you have 20$. This (Total Audio Converter) will do the trick.

Why would anyone pay for something that can be found for free with a little bit of effort? It's amazing what some people charge money for.

#

In my experience, I'd rather pay a little bit of cash than to download a program with adware or other superfluous crap tacked on. Which has happened to me a few times. If it's too good to be true, it probably is. There's people who spend money on lots of different shit. It just depends on whether or not it's worth it to you. Anyway, that's just the first program I found that does what he wants. I'd probably look for a torrent first, but if you wear yourself out looking - here's an option that's guaranteed to do what you want.

Go for the GNU program if you can find one.

5 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

Why would anyone pay for something that can be found for free with a little bit of effort? It's amazing what some people charge money for.

Because the stuff for free isn't always that easy to find and in my experience you can have trouble locating the tools again if you need them. For example, there was this tool I used for extracting music from a game a while back but forgot to do one of the other files that had some music in it too. Went back to find the tool again (because I did this on a VM) and the download links were dead. I've done forgot what the tool was since this was like last year.