Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] ".mid" files playing in Linux games
From: drclaw_AT_dogsolitude.org
Date: Thu Jan 29 2004 - 01:32:12 EET
On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 03:52:38PM -0500, Dominic Genest wrote:
> Yes I am familiar with "mod" files which, more precisely, were born in the
> Amiga world. Generally speaking, they're best at techno songs.
>
> Mine are rather "piano only", classical-like, songs. Those usually sound
> better with midi sequencers.
I would have to completely disagree. It isn't that one is "better" than
the other, they both have pluses and minuses. At a certain level,
however, you can achieve roughly the same overall efficiency. A properly
coded software synthesizer is by all means more versatile and more likely
to make things sound "natural", but on the other hand, this is only if
your music (and the synthesizer) take proper advantage of MIDI's
"expressive controls". The most important of which is velocity, I'd
say.
If you don't plan on using any velocity information, you can do
the same thing with a good set of samples (~one per octave per
instrument) and a tracker as you could with a MIDI synth that uses up
around the same amount of system resources. You could also do this with
timidity, but I kinda think a tracker would be more intuitive... I mean,
timidity isn't exactly a synthesizer, it works pretty much like a
tracker as far as I can tell.
To find a true "synth" that runs with this much efficiency and sounds
just as good as the tracked (or timidity) option, I think it would be
easier to find the nice piano samples. Of course, if you're willing to
shell out more system resources (mostly processing power) to make your
velocity information truly "synthesize" the sounds in an expressive
manner, that would certainly sound better.
The thing that you (IMHO) want to figure out is if you can sacrifice that
processing power and resources, and if a good synth like that even
exists... which is why you're asking... but I just thought I'd toss out
the tracker/timidity option as a truly viable alternative if you can't
find something that sounds better at a reasonable resource level.
Cheers,
784 - Michael C. Piantedosi - drclaw_AT_dogsolitude.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Thu Jan 29 2004 - 01:27:05 EET