Lemmings MIDI critique

[guest]

As some of you might know, a week or two ago Ahribar requested for MIDIs of ONML music and the music from the "special graphics levels" of original Lemmings.

I'm finally making some good progress, as explained on the "Cheapo music questions" thread on the "Level Design" board.

Anyway, here is the midi for ONML music #2.

http://www.geocities.com/guestlevels/lemmings/onml_2.mid

Please have a listen and tell me what you think.  (Note:  I'm aware that currently the music's cut-off point is somewhat abrupt, it'll be fixed soon.)

More to follow in the coming weeks......

[Conway]

I don't recognise it, but it sounds good.  B)

[guest]

Interesting, so maybe the Gensis/Megadrive version of ONML has different music then?  ::

It would be really cool if someone can find me the ROM for the Megadrive/Genesis version of ONML......

[Conway]

I don't think there is one. I've never heard of ONML for the Genesis or Megadrive, anyway. Maybe that's why so many of the new levels in the Genesis/Megadrive original Lemmings were remakes from ONML in the original graphics.

[guest]

So which version of ONML did you have?

[Conway]

I've only played the Windows verson.

[guest]

Oh ok that explains it then.  I don't think the Windows version has any new music specifically for ONML levels.

[Proxima]

Very cool! I love the mixture of recognisability and novelty.... and it's good that you've fixed the speed problem as well. Can't wait for the rest!

[DragonsLover]

Not bad, but this is only Piano. Also, I already started my version and I think it would be better.

[guest]

Really?  :: I have already put in the instrumentation, so you should be hearing different instruments.

Please tell me which sound card you have, meaning in particular the one you used to playback the MIDI.  I can't guarantee to fix the problem but I'll try.  I'm assuming from your description that you can hear all the parts, just that they all seem to be the same, default instrument of "Acoustic Piano" (patch #1).

[guest]

Ok, I have re-uploaded the MIDI in the hopes that it might fix your problem (I can't tell since the MIDI works fine on my computer, and apparently so on Conway's and Ahribar's.)  Try downloading the MIDI again at same location and see if it works for you this time.

As a reference to what you should expect to hear, I've also gone through the trouble of rendering the MIDI into an MP3.  You can download the reference MP3 from

http://www.geocities.com/guestlevels/lemmings/onml2_midi.mp3

If Yahoo is not letting you download, try replacing the "guestlevels" part of the URL with "guestlevels1", "guestlevels2", or "guestlevels3".  I specifically set up these additional mirrors to ensure the file is reasonably available.

[No additional changes were made to the MIDI other than what I think might fix DragonsLover's problem.  Please don't download the MP3 unless the MIDI sounds very different on your computer than the one I uploaded earlier.  (And tell me if that's the case.)]

[DragonsLover]

Have you tried to convert the song from the game in Midi format? Because when I tried to open it, it said that there's some format errors in the songs. It told me that some notes never end, some notes have a duration longer than 1 measure and the first Track have multiple instruments.

So, the program said that it added 150 notes events, removed 9 unnecessary Program Change events, repaired invalid parameters for 6 events and events were moved to new tracks so that each track plays s single MIDI channel.

What is the way you used to convert songs in MIDI?

[guest]

Have you tried to convert the song from the game in Midi format? Because when I tried to open it, it said that there's some format errors in the songs. It told me that some notes never end, some notes have a duration longer than 1 measure and the first Track have multiple instruments.

What your program "complained" about is completely expected.  I apologize that some notes didn't end, that I probably should fix.  However, I think it's ridiculous that your program would not allow notes to have duration longer than 1 measure, or that the first track have multiple instruments.

I had tested the MIDI in Cheapo itself and also by playing it on Windows Media Player, and neither complained about it.  I was also able to import it into Microsoft DirectMusic which also was able to understand the file okay enough to render it into .WAV, from which I made the MP3.

So, the program said that it added 150 notes events, removed 9 unnecessary Program Change events, repaired invalid parameters for 6 events and events were moved to new tracks so that each track plays s single MIDI channel.

If it's not too much trouble I'd like to see what your program did to the MIDI.  By the way which program is it?  Just curious.

What is the way you used to convert songs in MIDI?

I wrote my own program to convert the songs based on DOSBox's capture of the OPL2 commands sent to the sound card.  Basically I take the frequency, volume and note-on/note-off times that were sent to the sound card, and convert accordingly to MIDI note-on/note-off events with the appropriate note number and velocity.  There are 9 channels in the sound card, so I put notes from each sound card channel into its own track and own MIDI channel number (except percussion which as you know needs to go to MIDI channel #10).  Instrument change events were inserted whenever the program sees a change in sound parameters on a channel (sound parameters include things like the ADSR rates, modulator:carrier frequency ratios, modulation amount, etc.)

There are two side effects to this.  One, since there is no reason for the game to constrain itself to stick to just one instrument on each channel, instruments do change dynamically on each channel and so the converted MIDI also have instrument changes on each track.  This however is perfectly legit in the MIDI file format.  Your program may complain, probably because the MIDI it produces happens to stick to certain conventions, but they are conventions not requirements.

A more serious side effect is that because there are no metric-based tempo information, the notes do not "line-up" correctly with the purported measures based on the purported tempo information.  From the listener's point of view that makes no difference whatsoever, but a program that tries to render this into a "sheet music" sort of format will very likely get confused.

I can fix both problems to some extent by having my program reorganize the MIDI after the conversion process, and throwing in some additional annotations in the MIDI file that hopefully allows your program to handle the MIDI correctly.  However, I have to admit they are somewhat low priority for me if all it does is to make your program happy, since the goal was for Cheapo to be able to play it back right and that seems to be the case.  But it's still possible that depending on which version of Windows you are using that might not be true either, so I'd look into this further if you try playing it from Cheapo or Windows Media Player and one of them complains about the MIDI.

Thanks for telling about this by the way.  Although not my highest priority right now I still like to know how various MIDI editing programs handle MIDIs and it would certainly be nice to produce MIDIs that can be handled properly by as many programs as possible.

[guest]

So, the program said that it added 150 notes events, removed 9 unnecessary Program Change events, repaired invalid parameters for 6 events and events were moved to new tracks so that each track plays s single MIDI channel.

I think the 150 note events it added probably stems from me omitting the note-off events for the percussion track.  On reflection that was probably in error and I will definitely correct it even though technically it shouldn't affect playback.

I can deal with the tracks issue by taking an extreme measure.  There are several different formats for MIDI.  Type 1 is tracked based.  If I use type 0, then everything falls into a single track.  Now the MIDI file specification made it clear the type 0 is supposed to be the minimum a program that handles MIDI files should support, so I believe your program will be a little more happy if I made the MIDI a type 0 format.  It should still be able to split them into tracks by instrument as it has already done so on the current MIDI.

I'm still a little worried about the purported invalid parameters and "unnecessary program changes", which is why I'd like you to e-mail me the resulting MIDI file your program generated from mine, to see what it tried to fix.  It could very well be bugs in my conversion program, and so even if it plays back fine in Cheapo I really should still fix the problems.

[guest]

Ok, I made a MIDI for "A BeastII of a Level".

http://www.geocities.com/guestlevels/lemmings/beast2.mid

Although I originally planned to convert the DOS version, it didn't work out as well as I hope.  In particularly the DOS version has a neat conga part, which unfortunately doesn't seem to translate very well in MIDI because there isn't a pithced conga instrument in the standard MIDI set.  I tried various substitutions but didn't really find anything to my satisfaction.  And I didn't want to drop that part either since what's left is somewhat too sparse for my taste.

So I think I'll leave the DOS version for DragonsLover to sequence, for now.  I instead whip out the converter I already had for converting SPCs to MIDI, and so this MIDI comes from the SNES version of the music.  The SNES version of BeastII is not my favorite, it just feels too cheery.  (The DOS version has a much darker, sinister sound to it.)  But it ports well to MIDI, so here goes.

Again, keep me inform if the MIDI does not play well in Cheapo or Windows Media Player.  Being a conversion, it will probably not look very nice if you open it up in a MIDI editing program, sorry.