One of my many collections. I was reading the plotline..and figured this is a good song for Titan when Dell and Syne first arrive and talk to the people, hearing about their greivances...or just about any tense situation if you want to use it. (P.S.I'm sorry, but all of my songs are midi since I have no capabilities of making them otherwise.. if this somehow makes it harder to use them, I will submit no more songs.)

I've been listening to my collection again... (literally, these are years old..I'm surprised my disk hasn't disintergrated into a million pieces)... and I think I've got one for Trosene... I'm reading the entire plot because for me, it's good to know what's going on in the game before I choose a music... So far, I haven't been able to write a single song. My creativity has gone out of me..and most of it that is left is devoted to hopefully my future job - writing stories.

Anyway - thank you. You don't know how many times I've kept coming back here to see if you've checked it out yet. I appreciate the feedback!

Thanks. I know most of my stuff doesn't go anywhere. It basically tells a story that doesn't end... you can kind of listen to it over and over - except I eventually get sick of it. Heh. The longest songs I have are really a bunch of medleys that came to me all at once. I'm 18 years old..I wrote these when I was 13 or 14.. and a great deal of my best stuff was done at that time, even if it isn't suitable.

I think I know what your saying, too: "It sounds good, but it meanders."

I'm almost the same way with my stories... only my stories turn out better (I hope). I think the real challenge I have with working with others music is trying to think of something that *I* could stand listening to loop over and over as I play a game. When I wrote before, it never occured to me that i'd find this place and want to contribute! I really do! I think this is a great way to feel good about yourself.

Back to the point, I really wasn't expecting an "omfg this is the greatest thing EVAR!" nor a "this is terrible" (A little bit, though... I have a bad habit of expecting the worse out of any situation)... but this is in the middle, maybe even closer to "greatest thing EVAR" but not there.

This song right here I can work with... I think I know what you're talking about. If I can cut the percussion and make it slower so it sounds like a kind of eerie thing.. maybe that's doable.

Or maybe I could read through the story and find a place for it... I'm quite willing to do either one. But if fixing it means going back and writing it again (yay for copy-paste), then I will.

Thank you so much for putting up with me (ha, ha).

Converting MIDI to wav is not hard. You're all looking at it the wrong way. MIDI is simply a standard agreed upon to bring all music related products together. It was originally just a protocol invented in 1983-ish for connecting instruments together, and allowing them to 'speak' to one another, and control one another. It's more like a network protocol then a musical generator. The majority of the commands sent over this network were of course, note on commands followed by note value, velocity, aftertouch, modulation routings...etc. It wasn't until 1990-ish that they added General MIDI which is the standard wave table set that we all know and hate <cough> love. :)

So to convert a midi file to a wave file you have to specify which tone you want to use for what 'instrument'. In the olden days that meant what tone generator, or synthesizer you wanted. So for a string sound you might use a Roland synth, or some other tone box. This was all connected via 5 pin DIN connectors. They were used because that was the standard power cable in Europe at the time, and the cables, and jacks were readily available. (they only use 3 pins)

(argh I'm not explaining this very well)

MIDI is only a map. You need to point it to where you want it to go. The sounds we associate with midi are only intended as place holders. The original idea was to use it when composing so you could let your client hear the basic idea and comment on that instead of getting the band together, or the orchestra and then having the client say he doesn't like the arrangement! (what a huge waste of time)

So you all need a source of sounds that you like to use. Unfortunately these are generally expensive collections. The usual aproach is to buy a sampler program that will play back samples of the instruments themselves with the midi notes pointing to that instrument. One popular program is Tascam's Gigasampler. You can run an entire virtual orchestra using this. The basic program costs about $100, but and you can get decent libraries from about that on up to thousands of dollars. They have one orchestral collection that is well over 100 gigabytes of samples. Think of an entire orchestra with all the subtleties built into the sampling engine. You hear that particular collection alot more than you might think. Big movies use it all the time as well as real orchestras.

I'll clarify this later. I just woke up so nyaaah!!! :p

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.

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!

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.

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.