General MIDI *can* be wavetable. That is to say, it isn't on older cards. (But for the most part, it is today.) MT-32 is pseudo-wavetable, you could say. It uses a very different type of sound reproduction. In fact, I'm not entirely clear what it does. Vlad, care to shed some more light on this?

And yes, these both use the MPU-401 interface.

Has anyone considered mapping from Mt-32/LAPC-1 to the full GS set of sounds? This might avoid awkward maps like the example stated in the FAQ (MT-32 #43 Oboe 2001 -> GM #54 Voice Ooohs).

Granted, this would only be useful to people who have MIDI daughtercards (I currently do not have one), but it would still be worthwhile IMHO.

Even better, emulation of MT-32. (Though I also suggested something similar -- mapping MT-32 samples to Soundfonts.)

Has anyone tried AWave studio at http://www.fmjsoft.com/ to convert an MT-32/LAPC-1 MIDI bank to something a modern sound card can use?

My card uses DLS MIDI banks, and this thing will convert TO that format. What is the file format for an MT-32/LAPC-1 MIDI bank?

I'm not sure. Vlad? Sounds intriguing. Check any oldish DOS Sierra game. (Any of the Quests.) Those all have special MT-32 samples. (Space Quest 3 has the best music (not just my opinion, it won awards) so try that one first. 😀)

Could you just e-mail me the bank from Space Quest 3?

I'm not sure that MT-32 emulation would be better than a GS mapping all the time. I understand the need to emulate the sound customization, but I imagine modern GS sounds a hell of a lot better than any samples contained in any MT-32 bank.

Can an SB Live or an Audigy use a MIDI daughtercard?

I learned about Awave simply by reading the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz knowledge base. And this card can use a MIDI daughtercard. (Yes, I do own one.)

dnewhous wrote:

I'm not sure that MT-32 emulation would be better than a GS mapping all the time. I understand the need to emulate the sound customization, but I imagine modern GS sounds a hell of a lot better than any samples contained in any MT-32 bank.

Can an SB Live or an Audigy use a MIDI daughtercard?

I learned about Awave simply by reading the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz knowledge base. And this card can use a MIDI daughtercard. (Yes, I do own one.)

Mapping to GS (bank 128 or whatever MT-32 is supposed to be, if at all implemented by your synth) will not be significantly better than mapping to GM. SB owners can download the actual MT-32 soundfont and "pretend" no mapping is necessary. But, as Snover correctly pointed out, games like Sierra's will never sound right with mapping. LA synthesis (used by MT-32 and LAPC1 as well as the D50 family) is somewhere between wavetable and analogue synthesis (i.e. permits sounds to be generated from both PCM samples and generated signals, complete with filtering, ring-modulation, LFO, etc.) So the next best thing to full MT-32 emulation would be to map MT-32 sys'exes to DLS2 sysex's (supposedly supported by MS's SoftSynth/DirectMusic), as suggested in he FAQ. But even in DLS2 you can't find an appropriate equivalent to the MT-32/LAPC-1.

V.

Where do I get this MT-32 SoundFont? I found the E-mu SoundFont home page but I do not see what I am looking for. I am tired so if it's easy to find don't think I am a fool.

I can always convert it to DLS.

Try http://www.hammersound.net

That's the best soundfont source I know of.

dnewhous wrote:

Where do I get this MT-32 SoundFont? I found the E-mu SoundFont home page but I do not see what I am looking for. I am tired so if it's easy to find don't think I am a fool.

I can always convert it to DLS.

You can get it from the AWE drivers or, even better, go on SourceForge's VDMSound support page and get it (it's attached to one of the MIDI support requests).

V.

It is good you have that bank posted, when I try downloading from SB all I can find is synthgm.sbk.

But, I can not get either file to open properly in Awave Studio, so I guess that idea will not work. The best laid plans of mice and men...

I notice SB's license agreement says that you are only allowed to use their software with Creative Labs products and not supposed to modify it. So I wonder if this is some sort of deliberate copy protection.

dnewhous wrote:

It is good you have that bank posted, when I try downloading from SB all I can find is synthgm.sbk.

But, I can not get either file to open properly in Awave Studio, so I guess that idea will not work. The best laid plans of mice and men...

I notice SB's license agreement says that you are only allowed to use their software with Creative Labs products and not supposed to modify it. So I wonder if this is some sort of deliberate copy protection.

Dig up the Viena (v2.13?) soundfont editor (by Creative) from the web; it should be able to open the soundfont and save it as something else.

V.

Dig up the Viena (v2.13?) soundfont editor (by Creative) from the web; it should be able to open the soundfont and save it as something else.

Unfortunately, Vienna errors on it stating that "The ROM samples used in your SoundFont bank are not compatible with those on your selected sound card. Playback of ROM samples will be disabled" after converting it from SF1.0 format to SF2.0 format. (I'm forced to do this by Vienna.)

In any case, I've attached the original SoundFont bank. Maybe it'll work for someone. (I can't even EXTRACT the ROM samples.)

Oh, I should mention, my sound card is a Sound Blaster Audigy eX.

Note: Upon looking at my sound card's properties in Vienna, it appears that it has no sound ROM. (Guess that could be the problem, but doesn't it use my regular RAM as a sound ROM like the SBLive! series?)

Vlad states the problem on his support page

"Note that it
relies on the predefined GM patches (in your
soundcard's ROM) to generate the MT-32 tones, hence
the small size."

153 of the sounds in the bank are on a chip on the AWE, there are only two sounds in the bank itself.

Now that I am more awake and looking at this I see all Creative Labs has done is do a mapping just like VDMSound.

However, perhaps those two sounds that are in the synthmt.sbk file are sounds that are not in a GM bank and are needed to complete a mapping to MT-32. My guess is adding these two sounds to a GM SoundFont or DLS bank (which can be done with AWave Studio) will improve the VDMSound mapping.

Snover wrote:

Unfortunately, Vienna errors on it stating that "The ROM samples used in your SoundFont bank are not compatible with those on yo […]
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Unfortunately, Vienna errors on it stating that "The ROM samples used in your SoundFont bank are not compatible with those on your selected sound card. Playback of ROM samples will be disabled" after converting it from SF1.0 format to SF2.0 format. (I'm forced to do this by Vienna.)

In any case, I've attached the original SoundFont bank. Maybe it'll work for someone. (I can't even EXTRACT the ROM samples.)

Oh, I should mention, my sound card is a Sound Blaster Audigy eX.

Note: Upon looking at my sound card's properties in Vienna, it appears that it has no sound ROM. (Guess that could be the problem, but doesn't it use my regular RAM as a sound ROM like the SBLive! series?)

The file came from the AWE32 installation kit,s o someone with AWE32 should be able to open the SF (though not necessarily be able to dump the ROM samples and repackage everythin as DLS or other soundfont). But I'd say it's not worth the effort since it's still an approximation.

V.

Can Viena open or save files in DLS format?

No, it seems to only use SoundBank 2.0 files. (It can also import SB1.0 files, but that's about the extent of it.)

Could you make a list in a text file of all the sounds in the synthmt bank? I'm hoping to see helpfully descriptive names.

The MIDI software that comes with the Santa Cruz (Digital Orchestrator) has a list of all the sounds in an MT-32 bank, but they're mostly cryptic things like "Elec Piano 1" "Elec Piano 2" that make a GS/MT-32 mapping somewhat ambiguous. And it looks like a map to GS would offer significant advantages. After getting through the first 23 MT-32 sounds I see that GS would offer about 6 sounds that would be lost in GM.

What GS does is extend each of the 128 MIDI banks, offering variable sounds within each bank. Sometimes these sound groupings are quite artificial.

I can see how it would be useful in that if you write a GS midi file it would still run on a GM bank, but some of the sound mappings would be way off.

And the one sound that is not contained in GS anywhere is "waterbells" (GS does have castanets).

I looked it up on google and there really is such thing as waterbells.