Re: The Artists thing

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Pieter Hulshoff wrote:
> 
> Just a question this time:
> When writing music, what format should one aim for? MOD (can you use
> your midi capabilities in the tracker programs btw?)? MIDI? WAV? MP3?
> Perhaps a combination (e.g. MIDI -> WAV -> MP3?). What format is
> preferred in games?

Well, for games sold from CD-ROM, space isn't a consideration - and you
may even be able to playback the audio using the CD itself (== zero CPU time!)
hence using WAV or MP3 might be a consideration.

However, if you plan on distributing over the net then asking someone
to download multiple megabytes of audio AS WELL AS the artwork, software,
etc is a bit of a non-starter.

Hence IMHO, MP3 and WAV are both completely out of the question for
music.

So, we are left with MIDI and MOD (and the host of other 'tracker'
formats that are essentially just extensions of MOD).

MIDI is a great standard - and there are lots of instruments and
software that support it - however, on the replay side, you can't
ever guarantee that the machine that does the replaying will have
all the exact same voices as the instrument that you recorded it
on.

That's especially true if you want little vocal snippets ("YeeHa", etc)
in your music.

Hence, MOD.

MOD is essentially the same idea as MIDI (you store "Note On" and "Note Off"
events with commands for changing the panning, volume, etc) - but all the
sounds you want to use for those notes are stored inside the file as short
WAV-like audio clips.

This means that when you replay MOD, it sounds EXACTLY the same on all
players - yet the file sizes are generally reasonable (although not
quite a small as MIDI).

If you doubt the quality of the results you get with MOD-like formats,
listen to any Nintendo-64 game - the N64 uses exclusively MOD for music.

Sound effects can be either WAV or single-note-MOD - it makes little
difference.  MP3 might be more compact - but on low end computers,
the cost in CPU time to decode them is problematic.

Conclusion:

  MUSIC:
    You should use MOD (or one of it's derivitives) for the end product,
    but you might want to use MIDI initially during the composition and
    performance phases.

  SOUND EFFECTS:
    MOD or WAV.

Question:

  What good MIDI-to-MOD convertors are there in the public domain?

-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net>
              WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
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                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net



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