Seeking Retrosis Music

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Commander Spleen
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Post by Commander Spleen »

Excellent. Malvineous seems to have a much more stable approach to converting them via CMF instead of directly to IMF, which also allows modifying the sound of each instrument. I'll keep you posted how it works out.
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

Wait... you don't even modify the instruments? You mean you can't even edit your midi files? At all?

Even my mod-> midi program lets you do that. Just what tools are you using anyway?
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Post by thehackercat »

No, once the MIDIs are imported into IMFCreator, you are unable to change the patches within the program. You must go back to your MIDI editor and change the patches, then re-import it.
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Post by _mr_m_ »

thehackercat wrote:No, once the MIDIs are imported into IMFCreator, you are unable to change the patches within the program. You must go back to your MIDI editor and change the patches, then re-import it.
While you cannot modify the patch numbers (ie Patch 81=Square Wave, patch 82=Sawtooth, etc) in IMFCreator, you CAN edit the patches themselves to modify how they sound. This is what I've been doing as of late for the music for Keen 9 that I have submitted. Everything sounds so much better with the edited patches
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thehackercat
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Post by thehackercat »

Thank Tom for General MIDI, or this would be an even bigger nightmare than it already is!
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DaVince
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Post by DaVince »

Levellass wrote:Wait... you don't even modify the instruments? You mean you can't even edit your midi files? At all?

Even my mod-> midi program lets you do that. Just what tools are you using anyway?
Sure, I went from MIDIs, and the resulting IMFs in IMFCreator tend to sound like crap, dropping many of the sounds (especially percussion). I just can't get it to sound right unless I make the actual songs in an Adlib tracker or something.

And heck, I even tried to keep the limitations of AdLib in account! :(
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

Surely though if you change the MIDI, the created IMF is different? Does nobody try even that?

And what's an adlib tracker?
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Post by DaVince »

Sure I did, believe me, I tried plenty. Just can't get the sound right for some reason, something is always missing.

An Adlib tracker is a music tracker that would make OPL2/OPL3 music.

There is one way I might be able to make my song correctly, and that is make an xm module in my favorite tracker, import the xm in an Adlib tracker (it supports it!) and then create entirely new instruments from that. Which would still leave the problem, how do I export the resulting Adlib module to something you can use? Record and export to DRO in DOSBox? But then, didn't the converter only supported versions of DOSBox older than 0.63? As you can tell, it's been kind of too much of an unsure mess for me to bother and try these things.
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thehackercat
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Post by thehackercat »

Levellass wrote:Surely though if you change the MIDI, the created IMF is different? Does nobody try even that?
That's what I explained... :p
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Commander Spleen
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Post by Commander Spleen »

DaVince, there's something weird about the MIDI files your program has saved. After a lot of CMF failage, I tried one in IMFCreator and found that it mostly worked except for the percussion and a couple of out of place delays. After re-exporting it from Rosegarden and removing the percussion track, it plays coherently in IMFCreator, so at least from there it's possible to edit the instruments and make it all sound right.

The percussion is still a problem, though. But it also sounds terrible in Rosegarden. We must have disparate drum patches somehow. Also remember that IMF needs separate tracks for every percussive instrument. It looks like there are a few different ones that play on the same track in this MIDI. What instruments are meant to be playing on that track?

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DaVince
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Post by DaVince »

Then I guess Modplug Tracker still sucks at exporting MIDI. I can't believe they didn't even fix that in the open-source version, years have passed... :dead

I'll give composing (proper, software-native) MIDIs in Rosegarden a shot later, I guess.

EDIT: as for what instruments are supposed to be playing, you could check out the mptm with Modplug Tracker. That one has the sound to it I was going for (it uses instruments from a Megadrive soundfont).
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