I have a buntch of things done in midi I want to play on my keboard but dont know how to go about it. I've tried line in and ive tried a mic but so far the quality is pretty crappy. I know you can get a cable that will have your keyboard play directly into the soundcards midi function. One end of the cable looks like a mic jack the other looks like a joystick port. Is this the way the pros do it?

The MIDI/joystick port is data only, it does not carry any audio. The first part is to connect the MIDI ports of your computer to your keyboard, which it sounds like you have already done. Then run the line output from your keyboard into the line input on your audio interface, which will convert the analog output of your keyboard into a digital format that can be stored on your computer.

When you have everything hooked up, load the MIDI file into a sequencer and play it to make sure your keyboard is receiving the data correctly and playing what you expect. Now fire up an application that can record the line input to your audio interface, set it to Record, and play the MIDI file. At this time just make sure the recorder is recording the signal and that the level is set right on the keyboard. If the level is too high you will clip the analog to digital converters and the sound quality will be awful. If the level is too low you may have some loss of sound quality due to the lack of digital resolution and also the fact that the recorded volume will be too low. If you are recording 16 bit wav files then try to make sure the loudest part gets as close to digital 0 as you can without actually hitting it (clip!). If you are recording to a 24 bit format you have more room and probably just want to make sure the peaks are hitting at least -6dB full scale.

Now that everything is set up and the levels are correct, play the MIDI file in your sequencer and record it in your recorder. Note that if your sequencer also plays and records audio then you should be able to set it up to play and record at the same time, which will very helpful for sync'ing everything up.

Hope that helps,

Ryan

wow thanks you helped out alot

Cool! I was going to add that this is pretty much the way the pros do it, the main differences being that of the quality of converters and the fact that pros will frequently run keyboards through high quality preamps to get add a desired character to the sound. The only variation might be if the keyboard has digital outboards the pros might decide to run that directly into the computer (through a digital interface) to bypass the digital to analog to digital conversions. In that case the main reason they would still record the analog output from the keyboard is so that they can run the signal through various outboard processors like preamps, compressors, EQs, and digital effects units that only have analog I/O.

Ryan