[NightFright]

Vocaroo makes samples sound dull. Sounds coming directly from the synth are crystal clear, of course. Maybe I'll reupload somewhere else later, e.g. on SoundCloud.

Personally I'd also prefer MIDI synth through a hardware synth. That's why I recently bought a Dreamblaster X3M since it's a modern synth that's developed and easy to connect. However, since it's not a classic device as the SC-55, old games will probably not sound as they did back in the 90s. You can set up a DB50XG externally, but it's a bit messy with some cables you normally would never need, and if you don't use MIDI playback really often, it's hardly worth it. An internal solution is more convenient, and some software synths come close enough to a hardware solution.

The SC-55 recordings are a fine compromise for people who don't want to bother with any of this, even though if it comes at the (negligible) cost of some disk space.

[MusicallyInspired]

 XxMiltenXx, on 26 June 2018 - 07:43 AM, said:

@MusicallyInspired About that VSTi plugin: If you do not want to buy the proper hardware then it's surely the closest match you can get and also easiest to set up, however, comparing them to the real devices you will notice differences, e.g. that it doesn't fully use the SC-55 sound map, even if selected it may use drum sets from the other models and also everything just sounds "harder", as if the attack portion is set wrongly and also some minor differences are notable with certain instruments as well.

I compared it to 2 things, the Roland SC-55 and the Roland SC-D70 (which uses the 8820 map by default) and the real hardware still sounds better compared to the VSTi plugin - considering the VSTi is essentially also emulated, it's fair enough I guess.. And you can get a proper SC-55 roughly for the same price, however setting it up might prove to be more difficult.

Good to know. I think it's a given that no virtual software emulation will ever sound 100% exactly the same as hardware. For one thing you don't get any analog signal noise like you do from 1/4"/RCA jacks in hardware. Similar to how recording digitally and recording to tape sounds very different. Everything digitally has a much purer, brighter, and slightly harsher sound. MUNT, the fanmade MT-32 emulator has done a fantastic job of emulating the MT-32 but it's not 100% exact either. But it is pretty well imperceptibly close. In fact, in composer circles people recommend recording with MUNT rather than a real MT-32 just do bypass the hardware's inherent noise/hiss. I know that the SC-55's original sampling rate is 32KHz. So the VSTi might very well be higher than that which will make it sound crisper and possibly more grainy if the samples are still locked to 32KHz. And if they're not they'll certainly sound different if the samples have been upped to 44.1KHz or even 48KHz. So it can be a taste thing most of the time. But using improper drum sets and whatnot is another issue altogether. I'm really curious to compare the two myself, though. If I ever have a spare $150 to spare for curiosities I'll pick it up.

Currently I'm perfectly happy with using my SC-55 (CM-500, actually) to record these music packs and not interested in anything but the classic sound. If I were to record higher quality music packs I'd go all out and use my full sound library, real guitars, etc. That's something I've always wanted to do for Duke, actually. I just never get around to these things and I tons of other projects (both started and hypothetical) on my "maybe someday" list.

[Rimantas]

Guys, which soundfonts do you use for games/wads, that don't have music packs? And is there the one soundfont, which would play everything right? I have found that 8MBGMSFX plays everything right, but it's quality could be better (its size is just 7,2mb). Chorium has very weird guitars, GeneralUser GS and Merlin Vienna plays some instruments too silent, Arachno plays most instruments too loud, WeedsGM4 and FluidR3 are terrible on most tracks. Any recommendations up to 150mb size?

[NightFright]

Arachno always sounded good to me, even if filesize is a bit big for my taste. On PCs where I don't have a hardware synth, I settle with GeneralUser GS v1.44. 32MB is a good size for a soundfont, and imho it should be possible to get enough high-quality voices into a size like that for satisfying results. It may have its weaknesses, but choir and many other instruments sound great. Some Duke3D tracks like alienz.mid turn out to be a bit weak, but I can live with it. One of the latest TCs for Doom, REKKR, plays well with it.

Soundfonts remain a matter of taste, and I doubt there is any that's suited for all games. I have been trying dozens of soundfonts throughout the years and nothing ever truly convinced me.

[Rimantas]

Well yes, Arachno is pretty high quality. I just taught drums are buried under another instruments. On some tracks i can't hear drums because of guitars for example. GeneralUser GS is very decent and never fails big time, but on some tracks few instruments sounds too silent. Anyway, i will stick to these two soundfonts.

[Rimantas]

Doom 2 track "d_evil" from level 31 sounds very wrong with Arachno soundfont, so looks like SC-55 music packs and GeneralUser GS are best choices.

[Rimantas]

Guys, check this iWAD, it has some incredible music tracks!
http://waper.ru/file/1853697/
Download button is "Скачать"

[Rimantas]

Something happened to that site so my posted link is dead. I post here .mus files from that wad. Also new version of Doom source port "Eternity Engine" supports .ogg files, music packs works on it.

Attached File(s)

•  d64m.zip (840.45K)
  Number of downloads: 485

[MusicallyInspired]

Does it support metadata loop tags too?

[Rimantas]

I didn't see any mentions about music packs. I just loaded .zip with -file command and it worked. looping is different than in zdoom - track fades out at end and after second starts again.
https://www.doomworl...um/25-eternity/

[MusicallyInspired]

So no meta-data loop tag support then.

[Rimantas]

Hello. Can anyone recommend me software for .mus and .mid conversion to digital audio (ogg, mp3), please? I have YAMAHA S-YXG50 WDM SoftSynthesizer and would love to make some recordings for sharing. Also i have Virtual Sound Canvas, but it's buggy on Win XP SP3: replaces many instruments with piano. I'm happy to be able to share these SoftSynths if anyone is interested. They are full versions.
https://drive.google...BcPJ6Mp4G-c2ZRQ

[VGA]

Coolsoft VirtualMIDISynth can render to a file with whatever soundfont you want.

[Hendricks266]

Try foobar2000 + foo_midi.

[Rimantas]

Thanks, but they use soundfonts or own components. YAMAHA XG WDM S-YXG50 is installed as system's driver and i would like to make recordings from it.

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[VGA]

You can use Audacity to record the audio while you play the song with a MIDI player like XMplay. Or a source port if there is no other sound played, maybe GZDoom with the console enabled. Then in Audacity you cut out any extra seconds at the start or the end and encode it to mp3 or ogg.

EDIT:
https://forums.rpgma...g-vorbis.10987/
Using that method you can add loop points to the songs with Audacity, like in some music packs:
http://sc55.duke4.net/games.php#

[Rimantas]

Thank you. I will try Audacity. For playing i use Winamp, it supports .mid and .mus files and can choose any system's midi driver.

[Rimantas]

I made some recordings with S-YXG50 driver. https://drive.google...acR-COPfOlVuatZ
If anyone wants to hear any midis on it, you can send me .mid and .mus files, i will make recordings for fun.

[Rimantas]

I just found a way to make ogg track loop in-game seamlessly without meta-data tags. I trimmed track very accurately in extreme zoom with Audacity. Tested with Eternity Engine and Zdoom, both looped seamlessly. Here i post one track recorded from S-YXG50 WDM SoftSynthesizer.  e1m1.zip (1.62MB)
Number of downloads: 469

[MusicallyInspired]

That's what I used to do before metadata loop tags were possible. Metadata tags are actually preferable because note trail-off and reverb decay get cut off when looping. It's actually not seamless. Either that, or if you copy the trail-off and reverb decay from the end to the beginning so that it sounds seamless when looping, but it'll have an abrupt start when it's first played. Metadata tags solve both problems aren't aren't too much trouble to implement. There's no reason not to.

Also, not that I mind my thread getting attention, but if you're going to continue talking about things other than my Roland SC-55 music packs, could you start a new thread please?

[Phredreeke]

Yes when I saw you had posted in this thread I got excited cause I thought you had released a new music pack

[MusicallyInspired]

[Phredreeke]

Heretic?

[MusicallyInspired]

So, some new information about the Heretic and Hexen soundtracks has come to light. According to Kevin Schilder, he did not compose the soundtracks on the Ensoniq TS-10 as once believed, nor any other wavetable/PCM module or card, but in fact simply on a Sound Blaster. People seem to agree that it was likely the AWE32 and specifically for OPL while General MIDI was an afterthought. There were also various tweaks Kevin implemented such as moving notes ever so slightly so that too many notes didn't trigger at once which would affect polyphony and cut off notes. Some notes he even cut out intentionally (mostly percussion sounds). There were many things like this that culminated in me hesitating to just record the soundtrack outright. I've always thought the SC-55 score felt a little lacking in comparison to OPL which sounded much more balanced and now I know why.

So, in light of this I've decided to do something rather drastic for Heretic and Hexen (but Heretic in particular). Instead of just recording it straight as it is, I'm going to be making tweaks of my own. Many of the patches used in the SC-55 version of the soundtrack do not carry over the feeling and vibe from the OPL version at all. Some notes are even in a different octave. Some instruments are barely audible at all. There's a guitar track in E2M3 that's so quiet I didn't even realize it was there. The "Synth Strings" patch that was used in a lot of the songs has such a slow attack envelope that it sounds like it's constantly trying to catch up with the rest of the music. Then there's the loop points. Some of them aren't seamless at all and wait for the track to finish before even bothering to loop. Most of the time out of beat with the song. I'm going to fix all of these issues by tweaking channel volume levels, changing instrument patches (sometimes using patches in the Roland GS standard and not simply the SC-55's GM capital tones bank), and reworking the loop points so that everything sounds seamless and a little less random. Not that Kevin did a bad job, but everything was clearly engineered for OPL and the translation to General MIDI and the SC-55 seemingly suffered from lack of proper attention that it deserved. The title track in particular is a hot mess.

Unlike the other music packs I've recorded so far, for Heretic and Hexen (as needed), since there's going to be a lot more work required, I'm going to dub these projects "Roland GS Deluxe Editions". So they're not going to be strictly speaking "authentic." But seeing as they weren't composed for the SC-55 in the first place (or likely any other wavetable/PCM device), taking steps to make it sound closer to the OPL version seems warranted here. Hexen had a couple releases with redbook CD audio tracks (PC and Saturn to name a couple I know of), so I can steer the quality more towards how those recordings sounded, but Heretic AFAIK has no official digital recordings of any kind so I feel I can have a bit more creative liberty there. Heretic will still take a little longer to complete in light of all this, but I believe it'll be a stronger music pack for it.

[Hendricks266]

Will you release your modified MIDIs with the SC-55 recordings?

[MusicallyInspired]

It would be easy enough to save them as MIDIs afterward I suppose. Right now they're Cakewalk project files, though. One problem is the polyphony issues still exist and will still be a problem. I'm getting around this by recording select tracks separately at a time and bouncing them all together digitally after as a single track so the SC-55 doesn't have to work as hard. And since I'm reversing all of Kevin's tweaks that avoid polyphony problems, it'll be even worse than the originals. But if you're using some kind of soundfont or newer module it wouldn't be a problem. Just don't try it with an SC-55. The results would be atrocious.

[0815Jack]

@MusicallyInspired

What soundfont would you recommend for using with Heretic / Hexen?

I'm glad that some is taking the challenge to recreate the music as truthful as possible

[XxMiltenXx]

MusicallyInspired, on 09 December 2018 - 08:14 AM, said:

Hexen had a couple releases with redbook CD audio tracks (PC and Saturn to name a couple I know of), so I can steer the quality more towards how those recordings sounded, but Heretic AFAIK has no official digital recordings of any kind so I feel I can have a bit more creative liberty there. Heretic will still take a little longer to complete in light of all this, but I believe it'll be a stronger music pack for it.

Don't use the Hexen Redbook Audio as a reference but also OPL. The CD version uses the MIDI versions pretty much and not all songs are featured. There's also a difference for "Bones" where the strings in the CD audio are played a note lower for some reason. This does not happen in the OPL version.

For my future versions of the SC-D70 pack I was also thinking of releasing alternative packs that make use of the variations to "improve" music packs, however I planned on featuring an "authentic version" and an "altered" version. I didn't plan on altering the songs themself though as you do now, however, given the information that the songs were based on OPL in the first place, it's sounds actually logical to do that as well then.

[MusicallyInspired]

0815Jack, on 10 December 2018 - 03:30 AM, said:

@MusicallyInspired

What soundfont would you recommend for using with Heretic / Hexen?

Well, I wouldn't. Some people here know I haven't been the biggest fan or proponent of soundfonts when it comes to classic game MIDI authenticity. But in all honesty I wouldn't know anyway. I just haven't used enough to get a feel for how they sound. I remember using Atomic Soundfont and RealFont in the past which are a couple decent free ones. But the lack of features like reverb and chorus effects have always stopped me from going any further. The SoundFont format has always seemed to me like a very limited quick-and-cheap/free way of getting wavetable MIDI sounds that you wouldn't normally have. Like the "fast food" of MIDI sound sampling lol. I've always preferred real synth hardware or professional VSTis (that aren't the horrid Virtual Sound Canvas, or at least the version I was subjected to when I was first introduced to it).

XxMiltenXx, on 10 December 2018 - 05:58 AM, said:

Don't use the Hexen Redbook Audio as a reference but also OPL. The CD version uses the MIDI versions pretty much and not all songs are featured. There's also a difference for "Bones" where the strings in the CD audio are played a note lower for some reason. This does not happen in the OPL version.

Yeah, there's quite a lot of tracks missing from redbook CD releases. Just not enough room on the disc lol! Of course I'll prioritize OPL since that's what it was composed for. That seems so strange and unique in the industry to do that, but both soundtracks really do sound great on a Sound Blaster. I haven't listened to Hexen's SC-55 score in ages but I don't recall anything terrible about it. But I also never delved to deeply at the time. I'm sure I'll discover all the little tweaks Kevin mentioned that I certainly found (and didn't expect to find) in Heretic. Hexen for the Saturn had a much better recording of the soundtrack than the PC version CD-ROM I have does. It's certainly from a newer synth module and not the SC-88 or whatever was used for the PC version. Always loved listening to it out of game. I will definitely be listening closely to all OPL versions and prioritizing them as well. It'll be nice to have a full quality digital music pack of the ENTIRE soundtrack, not limited to the handful of redbook tracks currently available.

Quote

For my future versions of the SC-D70 pack I was also thinking of releasing alternative packs that make use of the variations to "improve" music packs, however I planned on featuring an "authentic version" and an "altered" version. I didn't plan on altering the songs themself though as you do now, however, given the information that the songs were based on OPL in the first place, it's sounds actually logical to do that as well then.

That's a great idea! For Heretic I was toying with doing both as well, but...it would just be a bunch of extra work for what I consider to be a bit of a shoddy afterthought with not much work put into it. It's not really worth it. Of course, the Doom community being what is, I may get a lot of requests for it anyway and if I get enough I'll do a straight authentic pack without any changes. It was at the Doom community's request that I included un-boosted/un-compressed versions of each track. Duke3D's tracks are boosted and I never did release un-boosted ones, although I had planned to. But if the request isn't there, why bother? It sounds great, I think. I may try to get away with just posting unboosted tracks for Heretic and seeing what the response will be like. I mean, it's already going to be quite different so why not cater to going the extra mile? If I get a ton of requests for authentic packs I'll also provide un-booster for those.

[XxMiltenXx]

MusicallyInspired, on 10 December 2018 - 06:24 AM, said:

Yeah, there's quite a lot of tracks missing from redbook CD releases. Just not enough room on the disc lol! Of course I'll prioritize OPL since that's what it was composed for. That seems so strange and unique in the industry to do that, but both soundtracks really do sound great on a Sound Blaster. I haven't listened to Hexen's SC-55 score in ages but I don't recall anything terrible about it. But I also never delved to deeply at the time. I'm sure I'll discover all the little tweaks Kevin mentioned that I certainly found (and didn't expect to find) in Heretic. Hexen for the Saturn had a much better recording of the soundtrack than the PC version CD-ROM I have does. It's certainly from a newer synth module and not the SC-88 or whatever was used for the PC version. Always loved listening to it out of game. I will definitely be listening closely to all OPL versions and prioritizing them as well. It'll be nice to have a full quality digital music pack of the ENTIRE soundtrack, not limited to the handful of redbook tracks currently available.

I wasn't aware that the Hexen CD for PC and the Sega Saturn had different Redbook audio. I only know the PC version and just listened to the Saturn version on Youtube and I must agree that it sounds a lot better. I wonder what they used for the PC Redbook audio. It does indeed sound a lot like an SC-55mkII, however, the "choirs" are even lower quality.
Beside that optimizing Hexen after the OPL counterpart might not be necessary as it sounds quite alright using them as-is, however some fixes wouldn't hurt (e.g. Swamp.mid, sometimes the chorus volume goes back up too early after fading out and due to reverb it's audible).

MusicallyInspired, on 10 December 2018 - 06:24 AM, said:

I may try to get away with just posting unboosted tracks for Heretic and seeing what the response will be like.

The music of Heretic is really loud to begin with, it might not even need boosting at all.

Quote

Then there's the loop points. Some of them aren't seamless at all and wait for the track to finish before even bothering to loop.

Do you think it was intentional for them not to loop or "did he just not bother" whether they looped or not? Cause even if it was meant for OPL, he surely could have made them loop if he wanted to? Because the Hexen music also doesn't loop and just fades out to start anew.