Stull wrote:And now my blasphemous opinion: no matter how much money you invest in equipment and no matter how "good" you make MIDI instruments sound, you still just end up with a bunch of synthetic music that is a laughably far cry from anything that comes from real instruments.
Yes, this!
I think it is important to keep what the original composers had in mind. If only some tiny fraction of the game-playing population had an exotic MIDI setup with all the bells and whistles, then a composer would probably not be writing game music with such a setup in mind, but rather work hard on making something that sounds good on a setup that everyone has. Sometimes adding fancy sampled instruments is not a step in the right direction. It's not like graphics where bumping up the resolution or framerate is usually desirable.
That said, the default instrument set on an SB Live is so completely different from everything that came before that something needs to be done.
Tek wrote:But in my research I've just uncovered more questions. Some MIDI devices appear to be ISA cards, others seem to be rack-mounted sound modules, some are keyboards. I'm no closer to understanding what (if anything) I should buy to take advantage of this apparently superior method of enjoying MIDI music. It seems to me I'm entering a world as large and complex as PC building itself.
Is there a white paper I'm supposed to have read? Is there a simple method to explaining MIDI sound to somebody who has never read a word on the subject in his life?
Thanks in advance Vogonites.
As I understand it, all it really comes down to are the instrument samples. A MIDI music file contains instructions such as "play middle C using a piano and play B flat with an oboe". An old, not-very-good sound card will, upon receiving these instructions, play primitive beeps that might sound vaguely like a piano and an oboe if you use your imagination. A top-of-the-line sound card will produce sounds that are a much closer approximation of the real thing. Of course, different sound card manufacturers will use different samples of the instruments, and so a MIDI file won't necessarily sound exactly the same on all hardware. Later sound cards could let you arbitrarily load up different instrument sets, sometimes in the form of "soundfonts", from your hard drive.
The Roland MT-32 standard is very well-regarded for producing MIDI music and is supported by a wide variety of games, but ISA Roland cards can be preposterously expensive, which is why it is sometimes desirable to connect an external unit to a different sound card, which can then be instructed to send MIDI commands to the external unit rather than processing them internally. Some of the source ports of DOSBox include a patch that will emulate an MT-32 using the original MT-32 ROMs. Other sound cards sometimes advertise MT-32 compatibility, but I understand such claims are often exaggerated.
A MOD file, by the way, is basically a MIDI file that comes with its own instrument samples. Back in the day, Amiga computers were very efficient in playing MOD files, but often they required considerable processing power on a PC.
[Someone please feel free to correct me if I'm totally off-base here.]
