MID2MOD conversion, browser player plug-ins and other helplessness by Dais! at 12:57 PM EST on November 25, 2013
hey it's me the helpless dude I could use some help.
I've been thinking for a while on making some forum topics (elsewhere) on GBA games, and for some I really want to be able to include the music via a browser-agnostic plugin (Flash, not Javascript). Playing with GBAMusRiper got me thinking how nice it would be if I didn't have to record from hardware or convert from GSF - being able to play a MIDI that draws from a soundfont hosted somewhere like FileDen would be really great, even if not entirely true to how the game would sound coming from an actual system.
But, to my knowledge, there aren't any Flash plugins that allow for that...?
Well, if that can't be done, it seems to me like the next best thing would be converting from MID to some module format, which would still save space compared to mp3/ogg and should allow for proper looping. My questions are thus:
1. What would be the preferred way to create a module from a MIDI file and the relevant bits of an SF2? Open ModPlug Tracker?
2. What do you folks think the best choice among Flash-based MOD players is? (I'm pretty sure they exist, yeah?)
3. Are there be one or more specific MOD formats that would best reproduce the same kind of sound as using GBAMusRiper extracted data with kode54's Foobar plugin?
While I'm on the subject, the vintage SPC2IT converter is still the only real way to do something similar for SNES music, right? I'm sure it has a number of downsides when it comes to more elaborate games, but are there any major drawbacks to it that I'm forgetting/ignorant of?
I can help in one regard. You mentioned ModPlug, which I think also has a browser-based plugin player you can use. Research it and see; that's all I know about it.
The modplug "plugin" will only work on some old ass version of Netscape. Trust me I've tried.
You're going to have to grab OpenMPT and write a plugin yourself, but good luck getting people to trust and install it...
Also loading MIDI files with ModPlug Tracker (even OpenMPT) produces a complete mess. You're better off manually tracking it by ear or by reading the bars of the MIDI yourself if you want it properly done.