I have nostalgia for some OPL soundtracks, since I was waaaaay too middle-class to have an MT-32 or SC back then. I have them now, and I do really like the particular sonic signature of MT-32. I also have a warm spot for 90s ROMplers, so I like the SC.

A lot of early CD-audio soundtracks were just renderings of Sound Canvas MIDI, so given a choice, I generally prefer the MIDI version because perfect loops, no momentary track seek pause in the gameplay, and less wear-and-tear on the CD drive. One exception is Loom. I only ever played that game with CD audio, and they use it for literally all the sound -- music and dialog. That's the way it "should be" to me, because it's what I'm familiar with, and PCM audio at the time would've been poor quality.

Later cinematic games (Wing Commander 4, Myst, StarCraft) moved to streaming audio, and from there, MIDI and CD audio were both pretty much dead.

So, my general rule of thumb is this: Nostalgia counts for much, so exceptions exist, but when I have a choice, I'll go for what the designers optimized for. If the game hails from the MT-32 era, then that. If SC-55 era, then that. I'll also use my AWE for some games, like WarCraft II, since it sounds pretty good. Not Sound Canvas good, but reasonably close.

If both are available, I always pick CD audio, in case the soundtrack has vocals.

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 is an example where CD audio has amazing vocals, and you would certainly miss out if you just went with General MIDI.

^ I am on the other end, if there is midi sountrack I pick it 😀

I remember when i bought back to 90s the cd version of Loom. Everything was coming from the cd. The music, the speech. It was so nice. On the other hand i was disappointed with the cd version of the Secret of Monkey Island because there wasn't any speech. Great cd audio quality but only music.

I always preferred CD tracks over MIDI. Yeah, games like RoA:Star Trail used Roland MIDI tracks records as CD tracks, but to be honest - who had SC-88 in 1995???
Also, I never liked OPLx sound. Always sounded like s**t when compared to Amiga.

Midi gives you choice. Tracks can sound very different on different modules. Playing around with that can be fun.

kolderman wrote on 2020-02-17, 15:48:

Midi gives you choice. Tracks can sound very different on different modules. Playing around with that can be fun.

Funny you mention that. When I got Wing Commander and loaded it up on my 286-16mhz with expanded memory in place and my adlib sound card... I had a friend of mine that was all Amiga or nothing that came over one day and saw another friend of mine playing Wing Commander on my PC.

Long story short, he couldn't believe how smooth the animation in the cutscenes were during the scramble sequence and was equally amazed at the quality of the FM coming from the Adlib compared to what he was used to hearing. He later got the game for his Amiga and still preferred to play it and beat it on my PC after school. Point being, to him, Wing Commander was the IBM clone catching up and in many ways beating out Amiga gaming in his eyes at that time.

Back on topic, I've always preferred Midi when available. I started off with the Adlib, quickly went to a SB 2.0 then an SBPro with I had paired with a TB Maui as I had a job in high school then and disposable income to buy nicer things by then. In '94 I got my first 486 and put an SB16 into it and about 6 months later took out the Maui and installed my SCB-55. I only wanted Midi after that and was quite sad when CD audio began to become more the norm.

In regards to Loom, I prefer the original Non-talking version of the game just for the amazing MT-32 soundtrack and that is the version I still play today even though I have the cd version in my collection.

Even on the recently released Sigil wad add-on for the original Doom, I prefer to play that with the new Midi soundtrack over the MP3 streaming audio it has available for it.

Dimitris1980 wrote on 2020-02-17, 15:32:

i was disappointed with the cd version of the Secret of Monkey Island because there wasn't any speech. Great cd audio quality but only music.

I thought there was never any speech Monkey Island in the game, just music/sound effects? Or am I missing out with something in my audio experience with this game (back in the day I only had SB, now I have Dreamblaster for proper MIDI).

CrossBow777 wrote on 2020-02-17, 16:42:

Funny you mention that. When I got Wing Commander and loaded it up on my 286-16mhz with expanded memory in place and my adlib so […]
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kolderman wrote on 2020-02-17, 15:48:

Midi gives you choice. Tracks can sound very different on different modules. Playing around with that can be fun.

Funny you mention that. When I got Wing Commander and loaded it up on my 286-16mhz with expanded memory in place and my adlib sound card... I had a friend of mine that was all Amiga or nothing that came over one day and saw another friend of mine playing Wing Commander on my PC.

Long story short, he couldn't believe how smooth the animation in the cutscenes were during the scramble sequence and was equally amazed at the quality of the FM coming from the Adlib compared to what he was used to hearing. He later got the game for his Amiga and still preferred to play it and beat it on my PC after school. Point being, to him, Wing Commander was the IBM clone catching up and in many ways beating out Amiga gaming in his eyes at that time.

Back on topic, I've always preferred Midi when available. I started off with the Adlib, quickly went to a SB 2.0 then an SBPro with I had paired with a TB Maui as I had a job in high school then and disposable income to buy nicer things by then. In '94 I got my first 486 and put an SB16 into it and about 6 months later took out the Maui and installed my SCB-55. I only wanted Midi after that and was quite sad when CD audio began to become more the norm.

In regards to Loom, I prefer the original Non-talking version of the game just for the amazing MT-32 soundtrack and that is the version I still play today even though I have the cd version in my collection.

Even on the recently released Sigil wad add-on for the original Doom, I prefer to play that with the new Midi soundtrack over the MP3 streaming audio it has available for it.

Yeah, Wing Commander sucks on Amiga... as almost all Origin games - great on PC, bad on Amiga. Even C64 versions of their games are better.

Dochartaigh wrote on 2020-02-17, 16:43:

I thought there was never any speech Monkey Island in the game, just music/sound effects? Or am I missing out with something in my audio experience with this game

I thought there was a talkie version. I dunno, I bought the CD version a year ago or so. Come to find out there are about half a dozen releases of it, and the CD version has some quirks. I would love to get a VGA 256-color version on floppy, but now that Steam and GOG have published versions of it (that AFAIK don't include the original DOS files), all the Abandonware sites dropped it, as it's currently-available software, and it's unobtanium on Ebay. argh. There is no good place to legally obtain old versions of some of this stuff.

Both have their charm.
Loved the music in Raptor Call of the Shadow's, and back then I was just a SB16 and crappy speakers no fancy setups in my teens.
But then I was blown away by C&C's CD audio soundtrack.

Midi had a major benifit. Games could jump to mid track of a song to better match the game play. CD audio could jump to a track but most early games simply played music like a standard audio CD.

Also at least Midi forced games to create their own music. Licenced music was cool when games like NFS first did it "hey I know that song!" but now I don't find the soundtracks as nostalgic as it's just music I've already heard 100's of times on the radio.

chinny22 wrote on 2020-02-18, 10:58:

But then I was blown away by C&C's CD audio soundtrack.

While C&C and Red Alert had great sounding music, they didn't use redbook CD audio.

IIRC, the music was was in some sort of compressed PCM format. The files were stored on the CD but they weren't standard 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo redbook audio CD tracks. Still sounded pretty awesome though.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-02-18, 11:22:

chinny22 wrote on 2020-02-18, 10:58:

But then I was blown away by C&C's CD audio soundtrack.

While C&C and Red Alert had great sounding music, they didn't use redbook CD audio.

IIRC, the music was was in some sort of compressed PCM format. The files were stored on the CD but they weren't standard 16-bit 44.1 kHz stereo redbook audio CD tracks. Still sounded pretty awesome though.

You are correct, I should have known better as well as I messed around with the hidden tracks in the mix file.
I shall go listen to Mechanical Man 100 times as punishment

CD audio / PCM is true recorded sound, unlike MIDI which is synthesized, so of course it can sound richer.

However, for background music in games I sometimes prefer the more laid back FM/MIDI rather than overpowering digital audio which tends too be too much bass, rock and heavy metal. Examples that come to mind are Descent II, and Romero's recent SIGIL Expansion for DOOM.

chinny22 wrote on 2020-02-18, 12:10:

I shall go listen to Mechanical Man 100 times as punishment

Heh, I might just join you in that. The C&C and RA soundtracks are amazing and I keep them in my music rotation to this day. The sequels had some good music too, but they never resonated with me as much as the originals. Probably because I played the originals a lot more as a kid.

On that note, I recently found out that the C&C soundtrack is on iTunes and all the songs are in stereo! This is noteworthy because the music was mono in-game.

dr_st wrote on 2020-02-18, 12:22:

CD audio / PCM is true recorded sound, unlike MIDI which is synthesized, so of course it can sound richer.

However, for background music in games I sometimes prefer the more laid back FM/MIDI rather than overpowering digital audio which tends too be too much bass, rock and heavy metal. Examples that come to mind are Descent II, and Romero's recent SIGIL Expansion for DOOM.

MIDI is nothing more than instructions that synthesizers can use to produce sound. It is not compressed sound. Given a good enough synthesizer, it can be used to produce equally rich sound to CD audio / PCM. In fact, it will be better, because unlike most CD audio is won't be post-processed to be as loud as possible.

well both can be argued, depends if the CD track was recorderd from synthesizers or with actual instruments, I like FM and GM for the nostalgia and all the individuality you can add with different sound cards and modules... a prerecorded track is just that... a prerecorded track, you can add some EQ and effects if you want, but it won't sound vastly different, not that much fun in that ^^

That's another thing -- MIDI is just more fun. I can play a MIDI track through an MT-32, SC55, Yamaha MU100, Korg Trinity, Ensoniq MR, AWE32, or pipe it to another PC and use software synths with gigabyte sample libraries. It's interesting to hear the differences, and rewarding to have hardware and/or software that makes it sound better.

A CD audio track is what it is.

I used to take MIDI dumps or transcriptions of game music and pick custom Sound Fonts to record it track-by-track into Cool Edit Pro. Then I would apply effects and re-mix the whole thing to sound better than it could with the real-time engines I had access to at the time. Good stuff!

yawetaG wrote on 2020-02-18, 18:22:

MIDI is nothing more than instructions that synthesizers can use to produce sound. It is not compressed sound. Given a good enough synthesizer, it can be used to produce equally rich sound to CD audio / PCM. In fact, it will be better, because unlike most CD audio is won't be post-processed to be as loud as possible.

Well, it could be if you used a filter to compress the shit out of your dynamic range.