This a small recipe for converting MIDI files to the more ‘portable’ CD audio format. The recipe is useful when you would like to show off your musical compositions and don’t want to lug your FreeBSD system around. :)

1. Audio tracks on an audio CD are stored in 16-bit signed PCM format. So the first step is to ‘render’ your MIDI composition into this format. I have found that timidity++ (in the FreeBSD Ports collection) works reasonably well for ‘rendering’ piano pieces:

   % timidity -Or1slS -o foo.pcm foo.mid
   

   Here the –Or option selects ‘raw’ output, and the subsequent modifiers select 16-bit signed (1s) linear (l), stereo (S) PCM. The -o option selects the output file.

   timidity++ offers a very large number of options to control the MIDI rendering process; do be sure to skim its manual page.

2. Once you have rendered your MIDI files, the next step is to burn the rendered PCM files to CD. This turns out to be simple:

   % sudo burncd -f /dev/acd0 audio foo1.pcm foo2.pcm foo3.pcm fixate
   

   burncd is part of the FreeBSD base system (i.e., a standard tool).

In my experience CD-RW media doesn’t work well in commercial CD players. The CD-R media I had with me seemed to work. YMMV.

References:

• The Red Book standard [wikipedia].
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• Compact Disc [wikipedia].
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• Timidity++ [sourceforge].
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-lelf is now in -current.

If anyone wants to write BSD-licensed equivalents of GNU binutils (nm, strip, etc.) for FreeBSD, -lelf should help ease the effort.