Midis looping to beginning 'hiccup'

[ohrrpgce-bugbot]

[bz#469]

In my game Tales of the New World I, midi songs that are made to repeat from the beginning pause for a brief moment at the end of the song before repeating. This interrupts the flow of the music. This occurs both in game and in custom's music import menu, and seems to occur with all songs all the time. All songs are midi's made with Anvil studio; most of them used to be BAMs and were converted to midis using mid2bam.

Test case song to follow shortly.

From: msw188
Reported version: 20070921 Ubersetzung
Operating system: Windows Vista

[ohrrpgce-bugbot]

Comment author: msw188

Created attachment 124
A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum

Attached is the simplest midi in the game - an ear rendition of "A Whiter Shade of Pale", by Procol Harum.

Attached file: WSOP.mid (audio/mid, 956 bytes)
Description: A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum

[ohrrpgce-bugbot]

Comment author: @bob-the-hamster

I was able to reproduce this with the attached midi. When I listen to most of my other midis, I hear no hiccup. A few others seem to hiccup a little, but it is usually so small I can't tell if I am imagining it or not.

I can't hold up ubersetzung any more for this, but we will look for a solution for voxhumana.

I am gessing this is a combination of a small delay in the midi player in SDL_mixer (which we probably have no control over) aggravated by the specifics of the notes at the beginning and end of this song. I tried opening this song in several different midi editing programs, but so far I cannot find a single one that gives me good information about exactly where a song or track ends :(

[ohrrpgce-bugbot]

Comment author: msw188

I agree, this would have been no reason to hold off the beauty of Ubersetzung. As for where the tracks end, they should both end together at the end of the last measure. If they ended wrong, the hiccup should have been occuring the whole time I would think, but it only started happening recently (I think with the switch to SDL, which gives me a bad feeling that it might be unfixable with that backend, as you hinted at). But I wonder why my songs are the only noticably bad ones? Could it be a specific instrument? The organ I use in the provided midi is also used in most of the others...

[ohrrpgce-bugbot]

Comment author: @bob-the-hamster

TMC recently tweaked the buffer size for the music_sdl backend. Can someone re-test this bug to see if it went away (or got better)?

[ohrrpgce-bugbot]

Comment author: @bob-the-hamster

The changelog for SDL_mixer 1.2.9 specifically mentions this issue:

Sam Lantinga - Fri Oct 2 07:15:35 PDT 2009
* Implemented seamless looping for music playback

Although neither TMC nor I has had any luck yet on building a suitable copy of SDL_mixer.dll 1.2.9 for windows :(

[ohrrpgce-bugbot]

Comment author: @rversteegen

Damnation! This isn't fixed in the latest SDL_mixer either!

[rversteegen]

Just tested on both linux and windows XP and found that this is fixed in SDL_mixer 1.2.12 (released 2012), as suggested by the changelog:

Sam Lantinga - Sun Jan 01 16:45:58 2012 -0500

• Fixed looping native MIDI on Mac OS X and Windows

I will say, although SDL_mixer used to be quite horribly buggy, they have actually slowly fixed most of the bugs over the years.