"High quality" DS music with MIDIs and DLS banks... by TheUltimateKoopa at 1:18 AM EST on December 23, 2012
So, I used VGMTrans to rip MIDIs from DS ROMs, and saved soundbanks for those sequences, as DLS files, and then played them in Synthfont.
One good thing? VERY Good quality, obviously. Well most of the time.
Two bad things. Well if I said ADSR.. you'd know what I mean. The other issue is any MIDI events on a percussion track. For example, if you know how the underground theme from NSMB sounds, you'll notice the percussion changes the pan position almost constantly, however, when I did the above, it was just permanently of the right.
Here's 2 examples from NSMB: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BxGzY1eGAiitTHZQR2swSWFsM0E https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BxGzY1eGAiitU2NKX29fVmFXLXc
World 8 Map, and Underground, respectively.
Does anyone know how do get the instruments to have the correct attack, decay, sustain and release.... things? And also, the whole panning thing?
Depends on the midi driver itself. This is the same/similar problem that exists with that "high quality" Mother 3 rip... sure the samples and the midi data is identical, but the actual sound engine doesn't cover certain things, like ADSR, vibrato rate/depth, and other things.
It's possible kode54's midi plugin in fb2k has these features or could be updated to include them... personally I think it's a waste of time since it'll be very difficult to make accurate, and would probably vary depending on the game anyway.
TUK: Dude, trying to do the DS version of GBAMusicRiper? I could understand in the GBA's case, but, my opinion, just add Sync mixing and other samplerate options to Vio2SF and you'd get virtually the same quality!
Lunar: You suppose panning commands would be covered? Since there were a few tracks that mistakenly treat 'em like vibrato commands...
I don't see that there'd be a problem with panning... though it depends on how it's implemented (for instance I know panning on yamaha's softsynths affects the volume output - as you pan a sound, the output on the channel you're panning towards increases while the other one reduces... difficult to explain.) It's just a case of editing the sequences so that the right controllers are sent, because yeah they might use proprietary controller numbers.
I meant if there are multiple percussion tracks on the original tune that have different panning, then on the MIDI since all percussion seems to be on channel 10 the panning is constantly fixed to certain position, somehow.
Damn that sucks! I hate trial versions!!! Oh well ill search again and see if i can find another better converter hopefully.
Edit: I think i found something http://www.extranslator.com/index.php?page=exsc, someone claimed this converts dls to sf2 but its not free either :( other than that i can't find anything else. there are alot more sf2 to dls topics than dls to sf2...sorry if i wasn't any help.
OK someone gave me a 'cracked' version, and now everything's perfect. foobar2000 is better than SynthFont... but I only used that because foobar2000 doesn't support DLS somehow.
Now, a related question....
Is it possible to rip soundbanks (in DLS format) from N64 ROMs?
Oh and.... how does it sound? https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BxacLww0mDf8RmZyVUNyREg3MlE