Is there a way to make MUNT always start at 50% volume and not go above 50% unless manually changed?
As of now, everytime it starts and a device connects (i.e. DOSBox) it always goes to 100%, even if beforehand you pulled the volume slider down to 50%.
On most games the 100% is just way too loud and it drowns every other sound effect or speech from the game.
BardBun wrote on 2022-06-04, 22:50:Is there a way to make MUNT always start at 50% volume and not go above 50% unless manually changed?
As of now, everytime it starts and a device connects (i.e. DOSBox) it always goes to 100%, even if beforehand you pulled the volume slider down to 50%.
On most games the 100% is just way too loud and it drowns every other sound effect or speech from the game.
The volume you are talking about is Midi adjustable meaning MT-32 reset messages sent by games/Midi files/applications always reset it to 100%. Some games/Midi files also send SysEx messages to set this volume to a particular value. That volume slider on Munt's interface actually just does the same: it sends SysEx messages to set the volume but other SysEx messages can override this.
BTW this works exactly the same way as with real hardware.
So what you want is not really possible with that particular volume. But inside synth properties you can find a control called 'Output Gain'. This setting cannot be adjusted by any Midi messages so if you set it to 50% it is always preserved.
BardBun wrote on 2022-06-04, 22:50:Is there a way to make MUNT always start at 50% volume and not go above 50% unless manually changed?
As of now, everytime it starts and a device connects (i.e. DOSBox) it always goes to 100%, even if beforehand you pulled the volume slider down to 50%.
On most games the 100% is just way too loud and it drowns every other sound effect or speech from the game.
While Falcosoft answered your question, for reference: the MT-32's "normal" volume level is 100 (which is max). So having it lower than this would not be desirable in most cases - it would result in reduced dynamic range of the synth. In addition, the MT-32 hardware is a quiet synthesizer comparative to more recent synths, so it's certainly not a "way too loud" piece of equipment, specific use cases aside.
My gut feel without knowing your specific hardware/use case would be that your mixer settings, either virtual or physical, are unoptimised, resulting in the MT-32 appearing loud. This is the same as it would be on original hardware back in the day, you needed to set your MIDI volume (i.e., emulated Roland MT-32) and digital sound volume (i.e., emulated Sound Blaster) to balance correctly. It is optimal to set it in the Windows mixer, changing the volume directly on the MT-32 module results in reduced dynamic range of the instrument. Increasing the gain in software is an option but is also suboptimal to my following suggestion.
If you're using DOSBox in Windows 7 or 10, once the game is open, you should be able to set the volume of the emulator independently from digital sound via the Windows mixer. The trick is before loading DOSBox (or your shortcut batch file for your game), load the MUNT software in an instance. This will create a Windows mixer device and allow you to see "MUNT: MT-32 Emulator" in it, and change the volume without reducing the sound effect volume (which if you don't load MUNT first, you can only control DOSBox volume, which will control both SFX and MIDI volume).
