I'm interested in converting MIDIs to MP3s.
I've heard that Logic Pro is pretty good at this, but installing Logic Pro and MacOS is quite a hassle for me (I use Linux)
Are there web sites that let you download both the original MIDI and the MP3 produced by Logic Pro to get a sense of how good it is?
Judging by your other questions it seems you don't quite understand how far midi is from real music. It's like expecting an highly evocative and emotionally acted stage performance generated from morse code.
But it all depends on how far off from the real thing you're willing to go. If you simply want to hear what a specific midi file sounds like there's plenty of options, like musescore (https://musescore.org/en) If in the midi file the channels are mapped to generic midi instruments it will use a very simple sound library to translate the midi signals to audio.
The closer you want to get to a real sounding human performance the more manual effort you'll need to put into it. Midi is like paint-by-numbers; it simply tells you what note to play when, with which velocity and how long. It doesn't tell you what the attack, decay, sustain or release of each individual note needs to be. What instrument specific technique should be used, e.g. a staccato can be played a dozen different ways on a violin. etc. etc. This is all information that will need to be added on top of the midi data.
And yes, this is something you can do in Logic. Or any other DAW. But make no mistake, it will be a looooong journey and you'll need to invest a lot of time, energy (and probably money too) into it.
There's one more option if you're interested in turning midi into music using orchestral instruments exclusively: you could use Noteperformer. https://www.noteperformer.com It's a plugin however so you'll need to buy/rent one of the host programs it's supported by. It uses A.I. which tries to provide all of that extra information that's necessary to come closer to a real performance. It's still way off, and in my experience, you'll still be massaging the midi to get it better, but still ... it's way less effort than doing it yourself with a DAW and VST's.
My answer on your other question dove quite deep into the practicalities of making MIDI sound 'real' and why it can be tricky, especially when you just have the MIDI file and want to apply sounds to it to make the most of the midi data you have. Does converting MIDI files to MP3 files require creativity?
But I think there may be a more fundamental missunderstanding of what Logic is and what it is not.
If you sent me a MIDI file to run through Logic to check out what happens by default I would happily import it, set my export locators and export it. Posting here you would receive, not garbage, but silence. I would see the MIDI in logic as either one track or a number of tracks (depending on the MIDI file type) and when I pressed play in Logic it would also reproduce silence.
You see the soundsets like general MIDI, TiMidity, various soundfonts etc are a totally different thing. They are preset collections of sounds small enough (in the case of the older ones) to be stored somewhere on a 90's computer or on an electronics device of yore so it could reproduce music from a MIDI file in the way of an old fashioned piano roll or similar. The snare sound for a given version of general MIDI, or any other MIDI sound collection that followed is just that, THE snare sound, the one sample that knows to play back the info contained in MIDI channel x on note y. There may be a couple of alternate snare sounds in the soundset but thats it.
Logic, on the other hand is silent with the same MIDI snare info. Once I have the MIDI imported then the left of the screen is where I can load what I would like to be played back by that snare information, choosing from 4 drum machines, a dozen synths of different types, a recorded sample playback device, or any other of the countless third party plugins I could have installed .
Once I decided on a particular drum machine to use, this may be the screen I was presented with;
All the controls in the pop up window you can see control the parameters for the snare ONLY, and in truth that's only a tiny subset of alterations you may want to make to a MUCH larger pool of available snare sounds at your disposal. The blue blocks in the background are the midi info from the file. The stuff on the left is how the audio produced (by the virtual instrument in the popup window) from the MIDI file will be processed and effected before being combined with all the other MIDI tracks into full quality audio or mp3.
You see, there is no default MIDI>mp3 process, it's all user defined. I could take a great MIDI file and make it sound HORRIBLE, or I could make it sound alright. Logic is one of the software's that current chart topping music is created on, it can output mp3's of music as professional as any artist you care to think of, it's a creative platform and just like other programs of it's type (Reaper, Cubase, ProTools etc.) it's not anything automatic.
It's also a MIDI editor (amongst other things). When I was talking on the other question about editing parameters to make the MIDI info sound more real it might look a little like this -
The list on the pop up menu are all the parameters mentioned in answers to your other question that are used to make MIDI information sound more real, but are specific, in many cases, to a particular sound-generating plugin.
So to summarise, Logic is not a MIDI>mp3 processor, well it is, but a 100% manual one, a professional tool. It comes bundled with enough audio creation and processing plug-ins to make something that sounds amazing (once you've edited the midi to something that properly resembles the original song). It's also a multi track recorder for analog audio/real instruments.
Most small scale tools designed to apply a generic soundest to a MIDI file will produce suboptimal results, I'm afraid the best you can expect is just not that great... You may not want to do any manual manipulation yourself, but I'd highly recommend getting a DAW like Reaper (which is free to try and can work on Linux), throwing in a MIDI file and seeing exactly how a DAW is setup and what it does/does not do.
