Midi Player For Gp32!?!?!?!?!?!?!

[retroboy111]

Look, All I wanna do is find a .MID/.MIDI Media Player for the GP32 THAT IS LESS THAN 8 MEGABYTES BIG. Where can I find one? :huh:

 

[Nitro]

There's a reason for its size. First of all, the GP32 has no hardware midi support so it all has to be done in software. Your PC has a sound card and the Midi is part of that. All of the instrument samples are on the sound card, but because the GP32 doesn't have this, the instruments have to be on the SMC. That's the reason the Midi player is 8mb or more, purely because of sample size.

 

[Ringo]

I've been wondering for some time if the size issue couldn't be solved with some sort of Software-synth. You know instead of relying on samples.

I'm thinking along the lines of what SID-emulation is, if you don't quite follow.

 

[mystic_twin]

hello,

I'm sure you could do that, after all there are a couple of SID players available for the GP32.

But the problem would be that GM sounds would be quite processor intensive to reproduce accuratly, even if grannular synthesis were used...i'll skip the tech.

To cut a long story short, it would require alot of programming and the sound would'nt be as good as the 8MB GM library.

Though, on a personal note, i think it would be cool to have some kind of soft-synth on the GP32. I have thought about it before, but programming is too time consumming to do it myself.

 

[Wolfsclaw]

how comes that the GBA has some great tools (which are less than 50kb) which can play midi files without any wait time and good quality and the gp32 doesnt?

 

[Charge]

maybe some sort of converter could be written. It would take the midi tune, check what instruments it uses and would put them into a bank to be appended to the midi file. Obviously the GP32 player of this format would have to be written as well. I would like to do this but all my time is taken up with another project.

 

[loki666]

because the gba must have a midi chip(like an opl/3 or dont know)

 

[mystic_twin]

I thinks it would just be easier to convert to Ogg or somthing?

 

[AlexW]

Well on my old Amiga there was a program called GMPlay which used som downsampled (22Khz I think) SoundFont from a SoundBlaster AWE32 (I think) and then it pre renders the midifile a couple of seconds before playing it (how long depends on the complexity of the midifile ie polyphony and so on)
This works on 68020 14 Mhz Amiga 2 MB memory! ARM9 at 66 Mhz is 10 times faster!

How he stretches and shrinks the samples to make it sound good I don't know...
The problem is you only have one orginal sample freq/note/tone then the program must stretch or shrink it to different freq/note/tone but it works and sounds pretty OK... with a faster processor ie ARM9 you could probably do some other tricks too...

The archive is about 7 MB with the program included...
Source is not available but it is possible to do on a GP32...
Samples is about 6 MB and that includes XG standard aswell... the GM sample library could be less than that I think...

 

[trooper]

Or you could simply convert them (midi files) to mod files (the type of files played with tracker programs, Such as Soundtracker, Fasttracker, Protracker and Octamed. Modplug tracker can convert midi files to mod format files.

Download here: Modplug Tracker

Trooper

 

[MegatronUK]

The midi patch set supplied with the old Gravis Ultrasound* card is 5.6mb in size. Most of the time you only had 512k of on-card memory to load the samples into... unless like me you had the Ultrasound MAX with 1mb upgrade

Anyway, I'm sure I've seen that patch set floating around somewhere... you could probably use that for the basis of a a midi playback system.

*For those new to pc's, the Gravis Ultrasound was the first hardware wavetable soundcard (I'm not counting the MT32 or SCCS - they were just GM boxes), what this meant that it loaded samples of real instruments into memory and played them back, (with zero cpu load - fantastic at the time of the 386 and 486!) rather than using an fm sythensiser to (horribly) emulate them. This is waaay back... before Doom was even released.

Nowadays its taken for granted of course.... but try loading up an old Dos game to see what it sounds like in 'Adlib' mode

A few years back, there was a program for Linux/Unix that used the Gravis patch set to provide software based GM capabilities ... it was called 'timidity' I believe. It was open sourse.

 

[AlexW]

Gravis Ultrasound! (512 KB version) Had one of those... great piece of hardware for that time...
Timidity is probably the way to go!
http://www.onicos.com/staff/iz/timidity/

Here is a "lite" patch and it's 1.5 MB in size...
http://www.freeusoft.net/gsplayer_midi_uk/

 

[WhiteFalcon]

MegatronUK:

I'm not counting the MT32 or SCCS - they were just GM boxes

You know that hurts, calling this liitle jewel (MT-32) a GM box Moreover MT-32 does not support GM while SCC-1 does as well as GS. MT-32 is a sweet thing and along with Sound Canvas the best for old dos games.