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VST Midi Driver Midi Mapper

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First post, by Trelokk

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I am using mudlord's VST Midi Driver (latest version from Jan 2018) with the Yamaha S-YXG50 plugin on a Win 10 x64 system. Until recently, the driver conveniently offered a midi mapper in a separate tab ("Advanced") which allowed you to change the midi output device. This tab now completely disappeared in Win 10 (probably after an OS update, possibly the Fall Creators Update) while it's still shown under Win 7.

Right now, I need to use the Coolsoft Midimapper to be able to change the output device. Is mudlord aware of this and can he do anything to restore all VST driver features for Win 10 users? Thanks in advance!

Reply 1 of 228, by Falcosoft

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I don't think it's easy to fix it since in Win8/10 the default MS Midi mapper completely disappeared from the system. So while in Win7 changing the default midi out port only required setting a registry key (HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\MIDIMap), in Win8/10 you need to implement a total replacement for the missing midi mapper. It's not a coincidence that Coolsoft had to write a separate tool (Coolsoft Midi Mapper) for Win8/10, while in Win7 you could change the default midi out from Coolsoft VirtualMidiSynth (without installing Coolsoft Midi Mapper) similarly to VST Midi driver.
So it's possible that you have seen the tab before the update in Win10, but it's unlikely it worked as intended even before the update. Just like an older VirtualMidiSynth version may show a 'pesudo-working' Midi Mapper->Default Midi Out device section even without Coolsoft Midi Mapper installed (since it can predate the recognition of missing default midi mapper on Win8/10) but actually it cannot work for the same reason PLWMidiMap cannot work on Win8/10.
Win7:
file.php?id=44963&mode=view
Win8/10:
file.php?id=44967&mode=view

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Reply 2 of 228, by Trelokk

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I actually wouldn't care that much about the option to change system-wide midi output if all game ports I am using were offering to change it via menu. GZDoom does, EDuke32 unfortunately does not (yet) (still).

MS is going down the wrong path with removing the midi mapper completely. The VST Midi Driver was convenient to use. You just needed the driver and a plugin. Now you need more. I hate being punished for using latest OS, and I also feel sorry for you guys who write these awesome drivers and software for us retro enthusiasts. It's frustrating to keep fixing what is getting broken intentionally.

I just hope that the Coolsoft solution won't stop working after the imminent April update for Win 10. I start becoming afraid of these major OS overhauls which tend to rather cut out good features instead of adding useful ones...

Reply 3 of 228, by flame21

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Trelokk wrote:

I am using mudlord's VST Midi Driver (latest version from Jan 2018) with the Yamaha S-YXG50 plugin on a Win 10 x64 system. Until recently, the driver conveniently offered a midi mapper in a separate tab ("Advanced") which allowed you to change the midi output device. This tab now completely disappeared in Win 10 (probably after an OS update, possibly the Fall Creators Update) while it's still shown under Win 7.

Right now, I need to use the Coolsoft Midimapper to be able to change the output device. Is mudlord aware of this and can he do anything to restore all VST driver features for Win 10 users? Thanks in advance!

Hi, it seems you are the only one I can find on the internet, that having Win10 x64 and VST Midi Driver with YXG50 plugin working!
Myself have tried so many times, on 2 different PC, one with win 10 ver 2017.09 creator update, one with ver 2018.4 creator update, both are having the same problem:
when I select the VST/Yamaha YXG Midi device in Coolsoft Midimapper, both in Dosbox and Win Media Player the midi music sound tone became a lot higher than they should be, all midi musics sound funny.

Coolsoft MidiSynth is working correctly.in both Doxbox and Media Player.

However when I use foobar 2000 with YXG50 VSTi plugin (so VSTi is going through foorbar's plugin, not via VST Midi Driver), it plays all midi files correctly. So the YXG50 VSTi files I downloaded must be ok.

I thought that maybe VST Midi driver does not work with win 10 x64, but it seems you can get it run correctly!

Last edited by flame21 on 2018-09-02, 15:12. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 228, by flame21

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Trelokk wrote:

I am using mudlord's VST Midi Driver (latest version from Jan 2018) with the Yamaha S-YXG50 plugin on a Win 10 x64 system. Until recently, the driver conveniently offered a midi mapper in a separate tab ("Advanced") which allowed you to change the midi output device. This tab now completely disappeared in Win 10 (probably after an OS update, possibly the Fall Creators Update) while it's still shown under Win 7.

Right now, I need to use the Coolsoft Midimapper to be able to change the output device. Is mudlord aware of this and can he do anything to restore all VST driver features for Win 10 users? Thanks in advance!

may I ask what windows 10 version are you using? maybe you are using an earlier version than 2007.09 creator update?

Is it possible that you can send me the vst midi driver and YXG50 VSTI files via email? My email flamecn@hotmail.com, thank you very much!

Reply 6 of 228, by flame21

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Hi kode54, is there a newer version?
All I can find, is the "VST MIDI Driver with S-YXG50" 3336k from google:
https://sites.google.com/site/f90d83a8/home/v … ididrv_w_syxg50

this version I have to set sound device's sample rate to 44100 Hz, any rates higher than this will cause higher tone.

...

kode54 wrote:

You need a newer VSTi driver, I have updated it to detect and use the same sample rate as the system, rather than being hard coded to one sample rate.

I just found that there are 2 versions of this vst midi driver - and I did not fully uninstall the older version.

So, after a clean uninstall and install the latest version from kode54.net/vstmididrv.exe, I can set the rate up to 96000 and still receiving correct sound tone! (192000 will be buggy, but 96000 is more than enough.)

kode54 you are the best! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Reply 8 of 228, by evgs

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https://kode54.net/vstmididrv.exe 

Link is dead...

I am confused.
1.0.0.6 is bigger and more fresh than 1.0.0.8
Can you share lastest version of vstmididrv.exe, please?

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Reply 9 of 228, by kode54

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I still have the source to the host bridge, since it's part of foo_midi, but I appear to have lost the source code to the driver itself.

You're probably better off using a loopback driver with a dedicated VST host application, as it will allow sharing a single instance of the VST plugin with multiple applications.

Reply 10 of 228, by Trelokk

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I have made a backup of the driver dated Nov 8, 2018 which you can get here.
Optionally you can also update the bass.dll library from 2.4.13.8 to 2.4.15.0 by extracting this zipfile to your C:\ directory (provided you are using a 64-bit system, otherwise dlls will be copied into the wrong subdirs).

Reply 11 of 228, by Trelokk

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@kode54:
Someone compiled an (outdated) VSTi MIDI Driver build with the S-YXG50 plugin and also provided source code files. May this be what you are missing to continue developing the driver? The zipfile contains a folder called "vstdriver-master". Files are from mid March 2017.

Reply 12 of 228, by Trembyle

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I've recently set up Sound Canvas VA and S-YXG50, and I am loving these for old games. Does anyone have recommendations for other VSTs that sound similar or identical to specific MIDI modules from the 80s-90s?

I naively tried to use Proteus VX, hoping I could get it to sound like a Proteus 1 or Wave Blaster 1. This was a complete failure. It sounds absolutely terrible in games using the default sound bank. Am I doing something wrong, or is this just not going to work for what I'm trying to do?

Reply 13 of 228, by Trembyle

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I managed to find the Proteus 1/2/3 sound banks on an E-mu Classics CD and converted these to exb files that I could load into the Proteus VX VSTi.

However, I've learned that Proteus 1/2/3 was not GM compatible and would need to be mapped to GM instruments. I'll experiment with this further. It would be great if someone has already mapped this and I could just apply a patch.

Reply 14 of 228, by Nazo

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I hate to bump an old topic, but has anyone found a good long term solution to this? I definitely have to agree that Yamaha XG sounds a lot better for a generic MIDI driver (with soundfonts you can do better, but you typically have to choose different ones and mix things around a bit for each individual song to make them really sound good. XG seems to have a good balance of just being at least ok for virtually everything "out of the box" so to speak.) I actually had the VSTi MIDI driver working at first on my Windows 10 x64 system, but then it just suddenly disappeared from the CoolSoft MIDI mapper menu entirely the next time I tried to use it (which was quite a while later, so I honestly don't know if it was just simply failing after a reboot or if an update broke it.) I can't really even guess at what could make it just suddenly disappear like that. EDIT: It seems uninstalling and reinstalling at least temporarily brings it back. But reinstalling over and over is not exactly a long term solution...

Honestly, I wish DOSBox itself could somehow implement XG synthesis directly (presumably requiring the user to provide the actual ROM I suppose,) but I know that is a whole complicated mess of a project in itself. (Still, then it would work on other architectures and platforms such as ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi so actually would be really great.)

There is actually a soundfont that's supposed to have taken samples from the XG synthesizer and reproduced them, but unless I'm just not finding a properly up to date one it just sounds positively awful. In fact, even though it's specifically supposed to be remapped for GM it sounds like it uses the wrong instruments... (I'm not sure what that means since the first part of XG is supposed to include GM so should be mapped the same shouldn't it? Unless I've misunderstand, GS and then XG extend beyond it rather than replace it.) This probably never could sound quite as good as a real XG synthesizer, but it seems like at least a decent stopgap solution and a lot easier (especially for people who don't know how to setup MIDI since I can just send them a preconfigured DOSBox setup.) But it doesn't just not sound right -- it sounds downright bad. Does anyone know if anything more has ever been done with this?

kode54 wrote on 2019-12-12, 23:22:

You're probably better off using a loopback driver with a dedicated VST host application, as it will allow sharing a single instance of the VST plugin with multiple applications.

In the most technical sense that is absolutely 100% true, but most of us aren't MIDI developers and it actually isn't such a great solution for us. Doing this is a lot more complicated (in fact, as much as I've dealt with MIDI, since I never really did any actual MIDI development I have no real experience with anything like this and don't even know how to do it personally) and increases complexity of what should be a relatively simple thing significantly (multiple processes and dependencies with parts that can go wrong.) That's in addition to the already increased complexity thanks to dealing with the lack of a proper MIDI mapper now. And while I could probably suss it out with a bit of time and effort, there's no way I could tell friends I've tried to setup with DOSBox to do all that. (In fact, it's already far more complex than it should be thanks to 8.1 and 10 removing the MIDI mapper entirely and having to use yet another piece of software.) I would like to add here that most of us DOSBox users are quite possibly never going to need to share a MIDI device across multiple programs. I'm sure developers may run across this from time to time, but I can't even remember ever needing two things to use a MIDI device at once even back with physical hardware as an end user.

Reply 15 of 228, by Trelokk

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I am just listening to the S-YXG50 plugin through Midi Player and have to wonder how great it would be to have this as a default Windows 10 MIDI device again... just like in old times. Before the VST MIDI Driver broke and nobody was around to fix it. I dunno if it's just a matter of updating the dlls that come installed with it or you have to dig deeper, but somebody should really do something since this used to be one of the greatest and easiest MIDI solutions, also and especially for gamers.

Reply 16 of 228, by SScorpio

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Trelokk wrote on 2021-05-28, 11:22:

I am just listening to the S-YXG50 plugin through Midi Player and have to wonder how great it would be to have this as a default Windows 10 MIDI device again... just like in old times. Before the VST MIDI Driver broke and nobody was around to fix it. I dunno if it's just a matter of updating the dlls that come installed with it or you have to dig deeper, but somebody should really do something since this used to be one of the greatest and easiest MIDI solutions, also and especially for gamers.

You may be able to achieve this using MIDIMapper to loopMIDI into Falcosoft's MIDI Player.

https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/midimapper

https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html

https://falcosoft.hu/softwares.html#midiplayer

You could probably have this automatically all start up on boot, but are you encountering MIDI that often? The main ways I run into it is listening to MIDI files, which are through MIDI Player and could access the VST already. Or an old game which you could start via a batch file to launch everything for you.

Reply 17 of 228, by Trelokk

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I play Duke3D and Doom regularly, both have MIDI support. The source ports support various MIDI setups, e.g. SF2 via FluidSynth, but you know... once you get used to a certain sound, it's hard listening to anything else.

The advantage of VMD used to be that it was a fire-and-forget solution. You set it up once and then it would load automatically whenever you use anything with MIDI music. Sadly, its major flaw was and still is that it sometimes simply stops working.

Reply 18 of 228, by Nazo

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Does anyone know if there is any sort of reasonable long term solution on this? The best I can think of is if we actually start putting everything in a VM, which isn't just very messy, but costs a lot of resources, so could be unusable on weaker systems like some laptops. It also brings up a lot of other potential issues such as wasting a considerable amount of extra space, being more limited in cases like newer older games (eg things with 3D acceleration that will get far less out of a virtual machine if any at all depending,) and of course licensing issues.

Reply 19 of 228, by Falcosoft

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Nazo wrote on 2021-07-05, 06:40:

Does anyone know if there is any sort of reasonable long term solution on this? The best I can think of is if we actually start putting everything in a VM, which isn't just very messy, but costs a lot of resources, so could be unusable on weaker systems like some laptops. It also brings up a lot of other potential issues such as wasting a considerable amount of extra space, being more limited in cases like newer older games (eg things with 3D acceleration that will get far less out of a virtual machine if any at all depending,) and of course licensing issues.

As SScorpio has written If you want to use S-YXG50 plugin on Windows 10 as a system wide solution you need these things:
1. FSMP + syxg50 pre-configured package:
https://falcosoft.hu/midiplayer_syxg50.zip
2. A software Midi Cable such as LoopMidi:
https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html
3. Coolsoft Midi Mapper to set the default Midi out on Windows 10 (it would be required also in case of VST Midi driver).
https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/midimapper

1. Insatall LoopMidi, add a virtual Midi Port and give it a name (e.g. FSMP) and set it to start with Windows (right click context menu on the system tray)
2. In Coolsoft Midi Mapper set the added Virtual Midi port as the default Midi out port for Windows.
3. Start Midiplayer.exe and in Device Setting Dialog choose the Virtual Midi port as active Midi in port.
4. in MidiPlayer's main menu set 'Start with Windows (System Tray)' .
Now you are done. All x86/x64 software should use syxg50 for Midi music even after restart.

I do not feel the above 4 steps to be unreasonable compared to putting everything into a VM...

@Edit: Other advantages of the above solution: You can also make different presets with the help of 'Configuration Presets' e.g. for:
1. GM/GS using SC-VA
2. GM/GS using Soundfonts
3. MT-32 using the built in Munt VSTi
4. XG using S-YXG50

And you can switch between these presets even from inside DosBox with the help of SysEx messages. You can switch between presets also with hotkeys. A video about preset usage from Phil:
https://youtu.be/zRyPjvbDkvg

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