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Audio > MOD vs. MIDI

#103121 - sgeos - Tue Sep 19, 2006 10:38 am

In this topic, kusma wrote:
A friend and I have been developing our own mod-player mainly targeting the gba.

Mod players are cool. I'll admit that I really do like midi players though. It's a lot easier to find midi musicians.

-Brendan

#103222 - tepples - Wed Sep 20, 2006 2:35 am

If you have the melody and stuff from a .mid file, it's not difficult to transcribe it into a .xm file. In fact, Modplug Tracker can probably do most of the work for you.

One problem with using .mid in your program is that you have to have samples for all General MIDI instruments and all General MIDI drums, which can take a lot of space.
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#103235 - sgeos - Wed Sep 20, 2006 4:08 am

tepples wrote:
If you have the melody and stuff from a .mid file, it's not difficult to transcribe it into a .xm file. In fact, Modplug Tracker can probably do most of the work for you.

Is this something that a non-techie can do?

tepples wrote:
One problem with using .mid in your program is that you have to have samples for all General MIDI instruments and all General MIDI drums, which can take a lot of space.

How much is a lot of space? (Definition changes with the medium.)

-Brendan

#103237 - sajiimori - Wed Sep 20, 2006 4:58 am

Of course, you can exclude instruments you don't need.

#103260 - headspin - Wed Sep 20, 2006 12:28 pm

sajiimori wrote:
Of course, you can exclude instruments you don't need.


And converting a MIDI file to MOD using MODPlug tracker only converts the intruments you use also.

I'm trying to convert some MIDI files at the moment using MODPlug, but it dosn't seem to recognise the GM instruments or something (playback is silent). The MIDI's play file in WMP so I don't know what's up. Perhaps I have to manually replace the instruments. I heard there are lots of GM collections on the Net in Sound Font format. I suppose there is a util out there for converting them to WAV.

There is another util called PTMid which can convert MIDI to MOD and it attempts to compress the channels down to 4. But I didn't like the GM set it uses (which only includes about 8 instruments).
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#103305 - tepples - Wed Sep 20, 2006 9:42 pm

You have to install a sound font (gm.dls) into Modplug before it will actually put samples into the it/s3m/xm files that it generates.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

#103355 - headspin - Thu Sep 21, 2006 8:16 am

Yeah it has the gm.dls instruments on the left panel, but strange thing I got it to work. I changed the file browser from "All Modules" to "Midi Files" and then it loaded and plays ok. Heh then I tried loading it again with "All Modules and it worked again. Strange, must be a bug or something.
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