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dont use midi - get a convertor to wav - freeware - look around

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Yeah. Right, instead of 10 MB the Mod will be 150 MB then, 149 MB Music and still 1MB plugins and textures...



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Havish (Updated to v1.2 !!!)

Pirates! (WIP)

My Morrowind Corner

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then covert it into a MP3 instead only !!! or change the bitrate n the wave think about it ...

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Midi has been around a few years before i was born! like they came out around 1982 !!! - thats no joke!

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I know, I bought my first computer back then. That's no joke.



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Havish (Updated to v1.2 !!!)

Pirates! (WIP)

My Morrowind Corner

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then covert it into a MP3 instead only !!! or change the bitrate n the wave
think about it ...

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I thought about it. I still don't get it.
The main advantage is the size: about 1% of a MP3.
Why use wav if you can use MP3? Why use MP3 if you can use MIDI? Just 'cause it's old doesn't mean it's no good. Just means they got it right the first time.

JOG: This IS great news; thanks for discovering this.


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Immersive Architect: Make Morrowind your world builder.
Morrowind Tech

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if midi is so good why no1 in game industry use it...

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I can name a lot of games using MIDI for it's music. Daggerfall which was mentioned earlier in this thread, for example. And the Warcraft 2 MIDI songs are still going strong.

Very interesting find JOG Congrats

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you know midi files are are 20+ years old! and are CRAP!

but still usefull to know if you make musik using fruity loops

dont use midi - get a convertor to wav - freeware - look around

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Sorry, but that's pretty crap idea, it's like making a soup from a gold eggs giving chicken. Maybee you just have crap sound card or crap midi settings.
BTW, alphabet is much, much older and still useful, isn't it?

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So, you can use mp3's as Sound ID's, and they'll play in game

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TundroWalker: Really? How did you do it? I tried a few things with no success. This would be really outstanding if it works, as it would drastically cut the filesize for a mod I'm working on (all of my sounds are currently .wav files, so the archive already weighs in at about 100MB ).

You do mean 'sound' files and not 'music' files, right?

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My Website
Bards of Vvardenfell Thread (New Info 8/15/04)


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TundroWalker: Really? How did you do it?...<edit>...You do mean 'sound' files and not 'music' files, right?

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1) Save the mp3 you want to use for a Sound ID somewhere in the Sound\Vo folder. You can save it directly in the Sound\Vo folder (EG: Sound\Vo\My.MP3) or (preferably) in a subfolder that's unique to your mod (EG: Sound\Vo\Lil\Conan01.mp3). I favor subfolders that are unique to my mods, that way my sound files don't mix with other folks, or perhaps overwrite them upon extraction from a zip. Plus, if you're working on multiple mods, you can keep track of which sound files are for what mod.

2) Open up TESCS, select "Gameplay > Sounds..." from the menu, and make a new Sound ID like normal. For sanity's sake, try to abbreviate your sound ID's for each mod with unique tags for that mod. EG: In my Lilarcor mod, I prefixed all my sound id's, dialogue, scripts, etc with "Lil_", EG: "Lil_music" was the Sound ID I made for the "mood music" mp3 in Lilarcor mod.

3) Click "Sound Filename" button to browse for your sound. While the Browser's "Files of Type" only shows .WAV in the dropdown (making you think you can only use wav's), you can type in whatever "filename.extension" you want. So...

4) Browse to your Sound\Vo folder that your mp3 is in. When you're in the right folder, type in your mp3 file's name, and be sure to put the ".mp3" extension on it so it knows it's an mp3. EG: I browse to "Sound\Vo\Lil" and type in "Conan01.mp3"

5) You've now got a Sound ID created from an mp3. So, you can use PlaySound, etc to toggle it from scripts.


EG: In my Lilarcor mod, I made the "Lil_Music" Sound ID from the "Sound\Vo\Lil\Conan.mp3" file. This Sound ID was going to be the looping "mood music" (the theme from Conan the Barbarian). As a Sound ID, I could call upon it using "Player->PlayLoopSound, Lil_Music", and it would continuously loop. To "mute" normal music in MW, I created a 1sec silent mp3 that I stashed in the Music folder as such: "Data Files\Music\Lil_silence_1sec.mp3" When the player selects to start Lilarcor's "mood music", a Timer counts 1 sec, and fires off the "StreamMusic, Lil_Silence_1sec.mp3" in order to keep the normal music silent. Meanwhile, the "Lil_Music" Sound ID is called with PlayLoopSound on the Player, so it follows them around.

The problem I had with using an mp3 for a Sound ID was two-fold:

1) Huge mp3's, (like the Conan01.mp3, which was 895k) took a few seconds to start up. When the player first activated the music, the screen would freeze up for a few moments, then the music would start playing.

2) You have to save your sound ID mp3's to the Sound\Vo folder. If you save it in the root "Sound" folder, or in Sound\Cr or Sound\Fx, MW adds ".wav" to the filename to make it a wav. I played with this in-game in the console, and noticed when I saved my mp3 in the Sound\Fx folder, made a sound ID from it, and tried to PlaySound with it in console, I got an error saying:

"could not find file 'Sound\Fx\test.mp3.wav'"

I know I didn't add .wav to the end....the game did. When I tried using a .wav file in the Sound\Vo folder, I got the same error, except with .mp3 tacked on the end:

"could not find file 'Sound\Vo\test.mp3.wav'"

That is why I suggest making a subfolder in the Sound\Vo directory, and stuff all your sound fx mp3's there that you're going to make Sound ID's with.

Also, as Ghan suggest in MW Scripting Bible v8.0, be sure the sound fx mp3's follow the MW Voice format: MPEG Layer-3, 64 Kbps, 44100 kHz, 16-bit, Mono

In my Lilarcor mod, I got away with using 48 Kbps, 44100 kHz, 16-bit, Mono. This gave me smaller mp3 files, and the sound is still good. I think you can use *any* kbps rate, as long as it's 44100 kHz, 16-bit, Mono. I have Sound Forge, which let's me dink with such settings as mp3 kbps rate, and it's lowest 44100, 16-bit, Mono setting was 48 kbps. If you can try a lower kbps, it may be interesting to see if MW will play it, but I'd think after a certain point, the sound would be horrible due to over-compression.

As a final note, someone (who said they were a program developer) emailed me about the Lilarcor mod complaining about the way I used a rather large mp3 (Conan01.mp3) as a Sound ID. He said mp3's aren't good to use as Sounds because of some cache'ing reason or because they suck up lots of RAM or something. I can't remember the entirety of the email because the guy was speaking in terms I couldn't understand. If there's some kind program developer on the forums that could explain (in simple terms) why folks shouldn't use mp3's for Sound ID's, then please do so. Otherwise, I'd say roll with it.

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You want a sig...fine here's a sig:

"I'm so goth, black wears me, the sun fears me, vampires worship me, death wishes for me...get the picture?"

(I'm not goth, I just noticed there seems to be a lot of vampire-lovin' goths that play this game...heheh!)

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..it does catch just a little bit when the song starts (the file is about 600kb, and it catches for less than half a second), but its barely noticeable (on my machine at least)...

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Haha! I notice you're working on a Bard mod, so let me guess. You're making it where the player can play bard songs, which silence the regular music and start up a PlaySound or PlayLoopSound Sound ID as the music instead (along with whatever special spell effects the song gives while it's playing)? I just thought it was odd when you said "song".

I think my situation with Lilarcor's mood music being an mp3 Sound ID that plays as "music" was a little out of the norm.

I could see other folks simply converting their .wav's to mp3's to use as Sound ID's for new creatures they're making. Or, for Ambient Sound Markers

EG: having an ambient sound marker in a cave that loops an mp3 Sound ID of people moaning, or being tortured or miners working.

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You want a sig...fine here's a sig:

"I'm so goth, black wears me, the sun fears me, vampires worship me, death wishes for me...get the picture?"

(I'm not goth, I just noticed there seems to be a lot of vampire-lovin' goths that play this game...heheh!)

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Haha! I notice you're working on a Bard mod, so let me guess. You're making it where the player can play bard songs, which silence the regular music and start up a PlaySound or PlayLoopSound Sound ID as the music instead (along with whatever special spell effects the song gives while it's playing)? I just thought it was odd when you said "song".

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Yes, that's it precisely.

The size of my sound folder for this mod just went from over 100MB to 4MB with minimal loss in sound quality. Thanks again. This info should definitely be in MSFD, as it would have saved me a lot of monkeying around.

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Bards of Vvardenfell Thread (New Info 8/15/04)


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you know midi files are are 20+ years old! and are CRAP!

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No

Midi sounds exactly as good as your hardware does.

It will sound like 1982 if you have some really appalling integrated sound or are still using a SB16 from 8 years ago...

BUT, if you have a modern card or good integrated sound (like nforce2)... it will sound great.

AND it will sound better than the mp3s that are *ONLY*, 99% of the time, digital recordings of midi tracks played on decent hardware.

Sure if you want to include tracks of acoustic instruments or vocal tracks then you would use MP3... but if its just synthesised music in the first place then theres no point anymore as most ppl have decent midi sound hardware now. Sorry if you don't.

Edited by Robynah (08/26/04 10:30 PM)

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mp3 ... all sad,who gives a .... about size ..we have 40gb hdd at least ...and connection ? what is age of cables and asdl.... i can get 7mb cable for 79e per months....jeez ..if you can afford 50e game maybe you should have at least 256kb adsl...

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SOME of us cannot get cable or dsl where we live, and file size IS an important issue. Game developers probably chose to use MP3 because it has better sound quality. Sure, i could get satelite internet, but that would mean i'd be paying $80 a month, and i really dont have the money for that

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My Icon Tutorial

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you know midi files are are 20+ years old! and are CRAP!

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Just to clarify: I didn't write this...

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AND it will sound better than the mp3s that are *ONLY*, 99% of the time, digital recordings of midi tracks played on decent hardware.

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Exactly. Practically all current pop music where you see singing dancers on stage instead of real instruments (guitars, drums...) Is done in MIDI on decent hardware. Sometimes a PC is used, sometimes not, but it's always MIDI format.

Heck, someone even claimed that the 150MB Daggerfall-Music that was sequenceded to Wav and then to MP3 sounds better than the original Midi Files. Here on my machine the MIDs are not only incredible smaller (16K vs. 3MB) they also sound a lot better than in MP3 Format.

Guys, when you can afford fast processors, fast graphic cards, tons of RAM and broadband-internet-connection, then please go and buy a decent soundcard. (Or in most cases just download a decent soundfont)



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Havish (Updated to v1.2 !!!)

Pirates! (WIP)

My Morrowind Corner

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Well Midi is not so easy to use like Mp3 or other formats...

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I agree to that quote. I think most of the folks who got interested in this thread have some kind of musical or sound engineering background, whether professional or just hobbyist. As such, we can argue the intricacies of midi vs. mp3 and so forth, and we have some experience with jacking with midi settings and such.

But, when it comes to the average gamer, they probably don't have the time, know-how or inclination to care about sound fonts, tweaking their midi settings on their sound card to make it sound better, etc. They want to pop in a game and play it, and hear some cool tunes that go with it. As such, mp3's are pretty fool-proof.

Game developer moved from midi to mp3 because, while it's a bigger file format then midi, it delivers the exact same sound/music to the players that the developers hear. There's no concern about someone having an old sound card that makes a midi sound poorly. Mp3's are bigger (albeit compressed so they're smaller then wav's), but A) everyone has a sound card that can play mp3, and B) most games are bought at the store, and brought home on CD's, so there's not much need to worry about download size and such.

When you get to the game mod community, though, download size does come into play, and folks with the DSL lines and cable modems have a hard time being sympathetic to dial-up gamers. It's always going to be like that no matter the argument. Personally, I feel smaller download size should be a focus of modders, because it will mean they've been more elegant and efficient in their modding, and because I still use dial-up (hehe).

But, I sure wouldn't want a modder to sacrifice quality for smaller file size. If an mp3 music file sounds better then a midi file, then by all means, they should use the mp3. Especially since midi can't synthesize words (IE: singing).

On a side note, I can't wait until good Text-2-Speech interpreters become standard in games or on everyone's computers. Then, we wouldn't have to pre-record speech for NPC's, or have the odd interface of Morrowind, where NPC's say pre-recorded mp3 lines, but then you have to interact with them in the text-based dialogue window. (I'd rather read all the text or have them speak it...having to switch from hearing an NPC speak to having to read their dialogue ruins the immersion of the game for me).

That'd be cool for games. Game devs could just compile small text files of the messages an NPC would say. Then, the game's Text-2-Speech interpreter would synthesize the text into voice using a voice font (female/male, accents, etc). It'd be a smaller file size since you wouldn't have to pre-record a bunch of mp3 speech files.

Some of the Text-2-Speech voices are getting really realistic (I used one to synthesize some British female vocals for a song I did once). It'll be pretty interesting to see if any games take advantage of Text-2-Speech software packages as the technology gets better/cheaper.

Side-note...exit, stage-right (even)

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Well Midi is not so easy to use like Mp3 or other formats...

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but A) everyone has a sound card that can play mp3,

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and B) most games are bought at the store, and brought home on CD's, so there's not much need to worry about download size and such.

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Most store bought games demand to install DX9 too, so installing a soundfont is a no brainer; hell installing a better midi player than XP has could be done for free, and a soundfont; and still not take up 1/10th the room of the mp3's they load onto the harddrives.

The hilarious thing is that most of the "game mp3's" and certainly most of the "popular music" mp3's are midis that have been converted to wave and then compressed to mp3. Such foolishness, just so they can pay royalties to whoever that swiss/german firm is that holds the compression patent.
( Frauhnhof or some such)
The argument for consistent sound might have held true back in the dos/win3.1 day when sb16's ruled the roost, and you had to do a config.sys and autoexec.bat especially to play your games; but those days are like the model T, fun to reminisce about but no one drives one on a regular basis. ""Why I remember tweaking an autoexec.bat once and getting 639K of useable memory for a game.....yadda yadda"
and that was back in the day when I walked twenty miles uphill each way, in the snow, everyday, on hand-me-down feet, to get to school."

Now the text to speech thing, that idea leaves me drooling and they can do that already, if you are running XP take a look at narrator ( which comes free with XP ) You do need a voice library of canned phonics. MSFT only ships one but you can grab others from them if you download the Speech SDK.

SPeech to command is also older hat now. Somewhere in the hardware pile I have two game controllers that came with speechtocommand software. Speech to text and a really good nonlinear Autonomous Intelligence that's the next step.

Quality is always one of the tradeoffs, if perfection is not attainable, then you set a quality level along with all the other levels and you trade off quality for time, or quality for eye candy or whatever.

I used that example mod you created the other day, damn fine sounding stuff on my system and my soundcard is a 3 year old Hercules running into a pair of MSFT headphones....

The reason the game producers are still using mp3 is that they are afraid to use better until one of their competitors does and their competitors are all afraid too. And if they use midi all the lamers with no sense of history or ear for music will caterwaul about stepping backwards.

And the really funny thing is that all these modders that have to use the "freeweb" hosting type places and face such severe restrictions on the monthly bandwidth; so most of the time their sites are shut by the end of the first week of the month and then they gripe in the forums that noone loves them, no one talks about their mods.
Cut the damn size of the mod by 80% in some cases and still have the same quality if they thought to use midi. But hey MP3 is kewl, it's l33t, its a way to "thumb your nose at the man." Invented by the man, royalties paid to the man, used by the man, yeah a real nose thumb all da way to da bank in da Benz.


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I used that example mod you created the other day, damn fine sounding stuff on my system and my soundcard is a 3 year old Hercules running into a pair of MSFT headphones....

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Hehe. Yeah, they sounded pretty good to me to. That's why I used them (hehe). Although, some sound a bit like cheesy Lounge music, with all the piano and stuff. I like midi, but 75% of what I dl'ed was horrible stuff...bland, monotone, etc. It's only as good as the time and effort the artist put into it. That "Mission Impossible" theme really shows what I'm talking about, hehe.

I didn't mean to come off so matter-of-fact or argumentative. I'm just looking at both sides of the coin -- midi vs. mp3 -- to try to understand why some of the folks on here are so adamant about midi sucking out loud. I know there's techno-philes that consider all old formats to suck when a new, bleeding-edge one comes out. Then, there's the mandatory schmoe that has to always disagree with everything everyone says on a forum. So that would count for the...hmmm, that would probably count for all the folks on this thread that think midi sucks! LOL!

I was buying something at the computer store the other day, and the salesman was going on and on about mp4. Apparently it's the new bleeding-edge technology, and as he was going on about it, I couldn't help but laugh as he kept saying "yeah, man, mp3 sucks so bad, man, it's crap." Sorry. Just felt like interjecting that for you techno-philes in this thread complaining about midi sucking. Apparently you guys didn't get the memo...mp3 sucks too. You guys are like *so* 5 minutes ago, man (hahaha!)

I'm in the boat with all the "midi is good" folks on here. General Midi is the standard language to transpose music to computers (analog to digital). Real musicians that can play real instruments can hook them up to the computer and record midi, then layer in the vocals and/or fx as wavs, then compile the whole project as a wav or mp3 to burn to cd. You techno-philes who think midi sucks, listen to Iudas...music mp3's & CD's don't just show up out of thin-air. Lots start as midi then convert to a recording format.

Of course, there are loop-based programs like Acid which folks can make music with, but I wouldn't consider a person who uses a loop-based music program to be a "real" musician...more like a DJ. In saying such, I kinda slap myself in the face, because, while I've produced a music CD using Sound Forge's Acid Pro, it didn't involve much instrument playing. (Well, there were a few songs I used my General Midi keyboard for, but mostly for creating a wav loop from a midi). I made most of the music from loops, mixing and such. I don't consider myself a real musician (IE: I can't play an instrument well or read music, even after 2 years in high school band). Real musicians can, and they rely on midi when transposing music to computer. Good stuff.

But, midi can't do vocals. Mod's can, I guess s3m can (I'm not sure on that), because they hold the vocal sample, but midi can't. So that's the only reason I think folks would prefer an mp3 over a midi. But given my pick, A) midi's are smaller, B) you can open them with sequencers like CakeWalk and change the instruments, or C) pull out one instrument and sample it for a song, D) etc. Midi's far more versatile then messing with compiled mp3's or wavs.

Again, I'm not arguing, I'm just letting you know how I see it, and playing devil's advocate here and there (hehe).

Say, Iudas, you sound like you know a thing or two about the technicalities behind mp3, wav, midi, etc use. Would there be a reason not to use mp3 for Sound ID's in MW? Reason I ask is some person emailed me a while back complaining that I made the Lilarcor's mod's mood music from an mp3 that I used as a Sound Id. The guy went into some programmer/developper speak about mp3's hogging system cache or some such, which is why wav's should only be used for Sound ID's while mp3's are reserved for music only (I can't remember all of the email).

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Many many MANY (40) years ago I supported myself by playing bass.
Imitating Entwhistle and Watts and McCartney. Then I moved to a real city and visited some clubs with real working musicians. And then I put the bass away and got a 9-5
I've used Cakewalk for my own enjoyment since it was win3.1 and not exactly crash free.
Midi's indeed cannot do vocals at all well ( although with a really good soundfont they can do passable chorale background oooohs and ahhhs ). My argument for them was based on that fact actually. The battle, explore and special music that Morrowind uses has no vocals, perfect for midi. And as I said in one of my earlier posts, if they were midis I could re-orchestrate them and have bagpipes and kotos or anyother instrument I have a good soundfont for. And since MW has a few "cheesy" bars and taverns and bordellos --- there is nothing wrong with some "cheesy" sounding lounge music to fit the ambiance.

I've done some looping and some sampling, they are artforms in their own right. Different creative drives.

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Would there be a reason not to use mp3 for Sound ID's in MW?

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I am not a coder or a dev, but so far as I can see, most new soundcards can handle mp3 decoding in hardware. So I don't see them hogging cache, maybe the mp3 decode process leaves some handles unclosed or has some other incivility; but cache gets swept quickly and efficiently in XP. The nice thing about speaking swords is that they can be done as mono waves of low fidelity and then compressed and still be understandable ( and funny ).
Apologies for not having a better answer to the devspeak

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I like midi, but 75% of what I dl'ed was horrible stuff

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Theodore Sturgeon ( semi famous Sci Fi author ) is credited with being the author of Sturgeon's Law. to wit "90% of everything is crud."
Holds true with any endeavour. 90% of all art, all music, all literature, all tv, all movies, all code. It's the other 10% that matters. And the problem has always been wading through the 90 looking for the 10.
http://www.fact-index.com/s/st/sturgeon_s_law.html



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