Originally posted by RDX
EDIT: Also, the steel drum as far as I know, is only in the Title Screen instrument set. So, unless if he's found a way to use the same set twice for different songs, he technically can't fix the Moo Moo Farms track because the Good Egg Galaxy song is using the title screen instrument set.
I have found that data (which instrument set to use for each sequence) a while ago, so this limitation is gone. When I first used the the "Moo-Moo Farm" song, it actually used the steel drum, and it sounded terrible. By the way, I'm not a fan of the original instrumentation, I actually find it more pleasant with the current instruments used in Mario 64, though I have to fix the bass which almost doesn't comes out.
Originally posted by Erika
Honestly? It's not that hard to make your own tracks or even fix existing ones to sound good with a midi editor. It doesn't take a "very, very long time" and it certainly would show a bit more effort (not that effort wasn't put in to edit the music in the first place, but you get what I'm saying)...also the instrument sets are simply using general midi, I garuntee its probably not that hard to edit them...might take a little work but in the end it'll be really worth it, you know take it from someone who's been dabbling with midi-based sound engines for a while now.
You are a bit misinformed, the instrument sets aren't general MIDI. While some Nintendo 64 games use straight MIDI or the 'compact MIDI' format, which are much easier to deal with, first-party games do not. They use simply a index which refer to the current loaded 'sample collection'. In the case of a direct port, even if you find similar sounding instruments, properties such as the pitch, the envelope and volume of the sample will differ so, even if you do incredible anal work with the straight binary commands it's still no garantee it will actually sound good.
Most sample collections contains from 5 to 10 instruments at most, so its rather limited. Perhaps some months from now we may be able to assemble our custom instruments sets (using the samples from the game) by rewriting all sound structs, but that is for the future.
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Mario 64 notes @ http://sites.google.com/site/messiaen64/
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