Fate of Io: Titan City under Martial Law

Post by Aetrus

(Aetrus) — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 02:34:08 GMT

I find FL to be easy to use. But then I only use it for loops. In the demo you can render a loop, but not save a project so for my earlier music I would create loops and build off of that. Now we're talking electronic techno/trance so loops worked well. I would use ACID Pro 4 to arrange the loops and chop them up accordingly. I would use a combination of effects and such to make it less repetitive, although those styles of music are by and large, repetitive.

But again, it's all about finding the tools that work for you. If you try something, and don't like it or understand it then keep looking until you find what is easy, and intuitive to the way you work. That's the way it should be.

Post by mystik3eb

(mystik3eb) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 23:40:02 GMT

I use FL Studio...the demo, which is why I can't save projects. It is hard to use, though.

Post by Stix

(Stix) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:43:16 GMT

I had Fruity Loops..then I got rid of it because I had no idea how to use it at all and it was frustrating. LOL

Post by Aetrus

(Aetrus) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 14:40:12 GMT

It's not always the size of the sample set that dictates quality. It's how its implemented. Sample choices are more important than you think. Personally I don't really like the 8 meg font, but it's better than most of the fonts I've heard.

Stix: Fruity Loops is a good program for electronic music. I use it occasionally. You can import the midi data, but it won't know what instrumentation you wanted with it. You'd have to manually asign that.

My major issue with midi is that there are so many better sounding ways to render your work. I liked the music for FF7, but the midi engine they used sucked so badly. That and a few other things that are not worth mentioning here really took that game down for me. (especially since they got such great synthesis out of the SNES...)

As the composer intended it....yeah that's is the most important thing here. Maybe I can try to rearrange one or two midis using my synth as a base tone generator. I'll see what I can do. It'll be a bit though. I'm busy trying to find gainful employment here Myrtle Beach.

Post by Stix

(Stix) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:12:23 GMT

Quote from Temporal:

If the MIDI was originally composed using a poor-quality sample set, simply slapping a high-quality one on it and playing won't necessarily produce good results. A lot of Dev's old work, for example, which was originally composed using the default 8MB bank that comes with the SB Live, sounds wonderfully crappy with the 88MB FoIFont.

I think the most important thing is that the final MP3 comes out as the composer intended it, and the best way to do that is to record using the same sample set as you do while composing.

Of course, if you have a nice sound card, you can use a high-end sample set while composing and have the best of both worlds.

I don't normally think about these things when I work with Anvil Studios. I just do it because it's the only thing I have, and possibly the only thing I ever will be able to work with for a very, very long time...

It's very depressing. :( But I do understand what all of you mean. I once tried to commit a MIDI file to something like Fruity Loops stuidios or something like that, and it didn't work out well because it all got a bit weird and overloaded.

Post by Temporal

(Temporal) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:13:37 GMT

I think the most important thing is that the final MP3 comes out as the composer intended it, and the best way to do that is to record using the same sample set as you do while composing.

Of course, if you have a nice sound card, you can use a high-end sample set while composing and have the best of both worlds.

Post by Aetrus

(Aetrus) — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 17:15:02 GMT

Well yes Temp, but all you're doing there is recording the output. If you want any kind of quality then you need to specify a good set of samples. Most MIDI wavetable sets are a few megs at best for 128 instruments!

Anyway, if that's all you want to do then all you need is a full duplex card (you'd be hard pressed to find one that isn't FD anymore) And some sort of mixer software that can route the midi out to the line in. Most can do this. I can do it with my craptastic SBLIVE! card. You can sequence your midi and set your recorder to record it as it is played back by your sequencer. (some programs can do that automatically using a 'render' command) Then you have a wave file. All you need to do after that is encode it to mp3. Even Winamp has an encoder so its not hard to find. Standard settings are 128kbps, 16 bit stereo. You can save some space, and lose minimal sound quality by encoding it at 64 kbps in mono. It's important that you specify mono because if you don't you will have a really crappy sounding file. (even in mono...a purist like myself hates even 128 kbps stereo...no top end at all)

That's the cheap and easy way. It can sound quite good if you have a decent soundfont, but if you don't then you'll just have an mp3 that sounds like a cheap midi. (IE: a waste of space)

Mystik: thanks! ;) And don't worry the Jazzware sequencer doesn't fit my way of doing things either. It's totally counterintuitive to the way I work. You just have to find the tools that work for you.

I guess you all have to take into account that I deal with pro audio gear pretty regularly, so I am accustomed to hearing the upper range, and higher end sound. To me midi sounds like a $20 mini keyboard. (hey! I had one. A yamaha 37 mini key MIDI board. I played it so much I blew out the speaker!) MP3 files sound terrible to me. They kill the top end that "no one can hear anyway". I can hear all that, and it sounds like a load of upper harmonic distortion that just strains the ear so much that I can't listen beyond a few hours at best. (my last hearing test put me in the upper range of people who can hear well above 12khz, and possibly higher than 18khz.) So for me, I'm going to automatically use the higher end methods since that's what I do all day. whatever :D it's all for fun anyway.

For you Temp, it would be like seeing a program with sloppy code that does that job, but barely. You know? blargh it's lunch time....:p

Post by mystik3eb

(mystik3eb) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 21:05:08 GMT

I rather enjoy Aetrus' posts, makes me feel I'm taking an online course. He's quite the descriptive one, ain't he? =p

I can't figure out how to use Dev's Jazz-something-majiger program, so I'll try Anvil again...maybe I'm just retarded and can't figure out these programs very well...or maybe my laptop just isn't the best machine to make music on, but I'll think of something...I want to be able to save my projects!

Post by Stix

(Stix) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:21:05 GMT

Yay! No, I understood it..but it certainly was a lot to read...

Post by Temporal

(Temporal) — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 18:53:06 GMT

Uhm... Aetrus' post made it sound way more complicated than it is.

Most sound cards will allow you to record the MIDI output of the card in the same way that you'd record the microphone input. All you really need to do is run a program that can record WAV files and have it recording as you play your MIDI.