Converting MIDI's to an Amiga native format

[AmigaFriend]

Originally Posted by 5h00n4y

Hmmm... that would be a solution too... a great one actually, no need for super-powered Amy's, can be done very fast on any modern pc, no need to mess with the tunes... the size should not matter with this as this should be a HD-only project. (wink, I'm not telling anything yet )
Thanks for reminding me about that xpect!

PS: so, basically an 8bit 11KHz IFF file should sound okays, right?

I would go for 22khz for better quality. 11khz is a bit muffled for sound. You could even play it through fast ram. So can be as big as you like it.

Tell me if you need any help with this.

[Shoonay]

Originally Posted by xpect

I would go for 22khz for better quality. 11khz is a bit muffled for sound. You could even play it through fast ram. So can be as big as you like it.

Yeah, might be better. Tho some other mid file I just tried sounded a bit better in 11Khz as there's too much high-pitch-hiss in the 22khz. Or that was ModPlug's lousy convertion problem...

Originally Posted by xpect

Tell me if you need any help with this.

Thanks, but if we're going to agree on this one, it's a piece of cake now.
All I need to do is load it in ModPlugTracker, save as wav and finally load in GoldWave, convert and save in the format I want.
Piece of cake.
Thanks again!

[AmigaFriend]

Originally Posted by 5h00n4y

Thanks again!

Ok Shoon, glad you have it now.

Just post here how your endeavors went, when they've finished!

[Shoonay]

I dunno if I can, not exactly my project, I was only asked for help
... still, stay tuned

[Shoonay]

Unfortunately, Don Adan dislikes the idea with IFF's, so if you could xpect, please check how easy converting some tunes would be.
I'll PM you the details.

[Shoonay]

It's not about skills, it's about low requirements.
Destination: 030/50MHz or higher

[Shoonay]

Originally Posted by Kada

[...] It would only play in 4 channels though [...]

And this is why it would be useless.
The tunes I checked go up to 25 channels so the music would not sound like music anymore.
I'm afraid without a good musician that would merge, and do whatever is needed to recreate those in 4 channels no extra super players will help.

[Anakirob]

There are a couple of apps for playing GM MIDI's on the Classic Amiga without additional audio HW. But they all have to do some pretty cpu-intensive calculations to get everything playing through the Paula.

GMplay & associated tools seems like the best mix of flexibility and performance. GMPlay on 020 + fastmem will play MOST GM's at reasonable quality. And it could be easily integrated in an OS friendly package.

But if you intend to do anything system-intensive while playing the songs, like if you intend it to be music for your action game. Then painstakingly converting them to MOD may be a necessity. As you don't want to lose all your CPU time just to play the music.

I would be willing to lend a hand at performing this conversion.
Merging percussive loops into one sample will save a few channels, as will making samples of chords. I would say the process is more tedious rather than difficult.

Also, converting to MOD gives the opportunity to replace the standard GM sounds with better ones. AND they will allways sound much the same, GM devices can vary widely in the actual sound of their instruments.

p.s. it a limit of 31 (not 16) 64kb samples in the MOD format

[Shoonay]

Thanks for the extra info Anakirob, hard to say what's the project's status at this point - the authors had somehow gone quiet and I'm not authorized to speak

[Shoonay]

Okays Anakirob, I'm sending you some files... right... now.

[meynaf]

About converting midi into regular tracker : can't a good musician listen to the midi file with good quality on a pc, and then make the same music on amiga as if he were composing it ?

Originally Posted by s2325

Your sound card must have midi sound synthesis (most of them have it, even integrated). Old SoundBlaster cards and clones were without it (midi music was generated, not played from sound bank).

Can't this be emulated ? PC ingame music usually sounds good enough even with no samples on the sound board.
I've had a look about MPU-401 (was this the name of the midi sound chip ?) but found nothing interesting.

[hitchhikr]

There's a wavetable/soundbank for a general midi device emulation (roland based i think) in Windows called gm.dls (provided with the os), that's the file Modplug is using to convert the midi into a tracker format.

[Photon]

There's no 64K limit in hardware. Surely some tracker allows 128K samples by now? And it's not that hard to modify even Soundtracker 1.0 players to play up to 256K samples - if the last half is looped.

Not very usable to eat up 256K with 1 sample for traditional mods. But maybe for other stuff...

Also, there is ofc no hardware limit to the number of samples, but in protracker [format] you can have 31.

[meynaf]

Limitation on number of instruments isn't important for this kind of music. When playing them with GMPlay they don't load that many samples.

Trackers with more than 4 channels are acceptable if mixing doesn't eat more than 5-10% cpu - and some channels must be used for sfx anyway (4 are already not enough because I'd need 4 mono channels).

Those musics that need to be converted are originally XMI files and there exist audio CD tracks for them. Would be GOOD to have tracked music instead.

Can someone do something or not ?

[NovaCoder]

You can play MIDI files on an unexpanded Amiga, you just need to convert them to MUS files (MIDI files with less instruments)...see the DOTT port for more details.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

You can play MIDI files on an unexpanded Amiga, you just need to convert them to MUS files (MIDI files with less instruments)...see the DOTT port for more details.

What DOTT port ? Only way to play DOTT I know of is by using scummvm, and when I did it there was no music.

[TCD]

This one : http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=47466

@NovaCoder
Always put a link to the thread in your post

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by TheCyberDruid

This one : http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=47466

Oh, ok. I've only had a quick look, and I have found no link to download the beast.

And how can it help me ? I can already convert the MID into something else if I want, but this won't solve the problem of the samples !

Btw. the MID I have to convert sound terrible on GMplay. I can't imagine a "midi with less instruments" format handling them correctly.
They're already XMI converted to MID and I'm unsure there was no loss...

Besides, the cpu load it takes mustn't be big, because I already have to cope with 640x480x8 chunky gfx.

Btw2. it's for porting Heroes of Might and Magic II on the Amiga.

[meynaf]

Ok I've found the link to DOTT. I'll grab it and check it soon.

EDIT: checked. It's MOD, not MUS. Just what I need

[NovaCoder]

Hiya,

Yep, you were looking at the old version of DOTT...not my port

I've uploaded a simple MIDI test applilcation for you MusTest.lha.

The code is not pretty but it shows you the sound quality + performance hit of an Amiga playing MIDI files.

You can use this MSDOS utility MIDI2MUS.EXE to create your test MUS files.

What are you coding in BTW? I'm coding in Storm V4 (gcc compiler) using C++.