XMI Playback Issues #38
Comments
I don't know about the clicks or white noise, but notes being cut-off might be because of the way WildMIDI handles looping. As you likely know, MIDI (XMI and other similar formats) doesn't actually contain any sound, it just specifies commands for a (software or hardware) device on how to play sounds. So when it reaches the end of a song, it will specify NoteOff events for the final notes and then end. A NoteOff event doesn't stop the note dead, it instead sends it into a release phase, which is a relatively short period where the sound fades out (like when you stop blowing into a flute, or lift your finger from a piano key; it still produces a little bit more sound before it goes quiet). A MIDI device will normally continue to generate audio until it's turned off, so even though the file may have ended right after a NoteOff, the device will play the instrument through its release phase and then go quiet "naturally". The XMI format contains custom commands for looping within a file, which specify that when it reaches a certain point in the "command stream", it should go back to a previous point in the file and continue on as if it was an uninterrupted stream of commands (this also means the notes stopped at the end of the loop will play through their release phase at the start of the loop, which better connects the two loop points without an obvious break or silence, as pre-rendered music files like ogg or mp3 will do). These custom commands can also specify how many times to loop, so rather than looping indefinitely, it can loop some portion only a couple times before continuing on to the next part of the song. Unfortunately, the way WildMIDI handles looping is that it needs to be done via code, and completely resets the playback state (so all sounds just immediately stop and it returns everything to a default state), and just starts fresh from the beginning of the file again. Standard MIDI files (aka smf, or .mid) don't support looping functionality like XMI does, and when WildMIDI added XMI support, it basically just ignored these looping commands. As I understand it, they will be supported eventually, but it doesn't currently.
No, it's because freepats is missing those instruments. I found that eawpats sounds much better and pretty much has all the necessary instruments: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.37/audio/eawpats/ (under the Source Downloads section, download and extract it somewhere, then copy |
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I understand now. So WildMIDI partially supports XMI then. It's pretty neat how XMI has that custom looping mechanism. I believe DOSBox also has the same behavior for letting sounds "stop naturally", so I know what you're talking about there. So the white noise sometimes happens at the end of a song for about 1/10 of a second. It doesn't always happen, and not with every song. I can't seem to open the |
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I'm not sure what I should be doing with I can get music to play by using something like |
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The Once that's done, you can change the Soundfont option in OpenTESArena's options.txt to that cfg file. |
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Yeah, I put |
More because |
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Well all of the instruments are playing now, which is to be expected because the patch files are there! There's still the problem of occasional white noise at the end of some songs, though. It's really quite startling if, for example, you're listening to something soothing like |
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Heads up, looping is being investigated: While the thread above goes into custom (non-standard) MIDI type 0 and 1 files with loop instructions, the implications of support would also effect XMI support by allowing for proper looping. So it is being worked on. |
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Great! Only two out of all the music files in Arena are having problems looping in a timely manner (because of the long pause), so overall it's reasonable as is. There are no missing instruments now, since I switched from freepats to eawpats. However, there is a cutoff and/or a split second of white noise that occurs when a loop actually does execute, though, which @kcat and I figured was involved with how WildMIDI currently resets its state on a loop. |
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@afritz1 the white noise, is this reproducible? Can you play back the music in the WildMIDI player and get the same white noise? If so, then it is likely a WildMIDI problem. If not, then it might be something else going on. Can you create an issue here: including a file we can use for testing? |
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\o/ :D Just the looping now. |
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Just a heads up: https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/opl3-soundfont |
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Great! I used unsf on Windows and the OPL patches sound very nice (a different flavor than eawpats). I messed around a bit in the floppy disk version of Arena in DOSBox, and it seems to only play one dungeon track, unlike the CD version which plays one of four. The DosBox.conf is telling Arena to play with a different -m option (Sound Blaster FM for floppy disk and General MIDI for CD). I messed around some more in OpenTESArena and I was delighted to find that WildMIDI plays XFM files just fine. This is where I discovered that the DUNGEON1 track is different between the XMI and XFM files. It seems to me that the Arena developers accidentally overwrote DUNGEON1.XMI with DUNGEON5.XMI because those two files are identical, while DUNGEON1.XFM and DUNGEON5.XFM are different. Users might be interested in having an option to switch between those two formats in-game so they can hear this otherwise unavailable track. Either that or the program should use DUNGEON1.XFM in the place of DUNGEON1.XMI. |
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Nice find! Yeah, I ran into stuff like that in my re-implementation of Eye of the Beholder 3. There are un-used assets all through the game. I'm planning on making a switch/param option for 'extended edition' that will add back all those 'newly discovered' assets. |
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As mentioned in #29, I don't have looping issues with OVERSNOW.XMI or SUNNYDAY.XMI. |
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Check the OpenTESArena console, I'm pretty sure they are OVERSNOW.XFM and SUNNYDAY.XFM, respectively. This is a workaround while WildMIDI does not fully support XMI looping. |
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Yeah I just assumed the .XMI files were being played. I'll do another test as I mentioned in the other issue. By the way according to the above comments everything but the looping is fixed, so I think this issue can be closed as a duplicate of #29, right? |
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Closing as duplicate of #29 as suggested by Allofich. This isn't really an issue now since the engine is using the XFM versions as needed. I think eventually we might want to tweak the looping a little bit so the music has no gap at all when reaching the end of the song, but that probably depends on WildMIDI having XMI looping. |
I decided to test the behavior of Arena's XMI music files in the program's current state. I tested them all as the opening music on program startup. Below are notes for each one. See issue #29 for related discussion.
I used
freepats.zipandwildmidi.cfgfor the MIDI patches and config file.wildmidi.cfgseems identical tofreepats.cfg, though. WildMIDI version is 0.4.0.Here are music files that play fine:
Here are music files missing at least one instrument (usually choir and/or xylophone):
Here are music files with a long pause at the end:
Nearly all of the music files have some kind of trouble at the end for a split second; either getting cut off, playing white noise, or playing clicks before starting over. Is this caused by the original XMI files, or how they're being interpreted? I would understand if the original files are just plain incorrect at some parts to begin with.
Why are some instruments missing? Is it because the freepats indices are incorrect? Or because WildMIDI is not reading XMI properly (I thought 0.4 fixed this)?
@kcat and @psi29a, your thoughts?
Edit: The missing instruments are because freepats lacks them. Using eawpats instead with
gravis.cfgseems to be satisfactory for Arena.The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: