[Mblake81]

Originally Posted by prprince69 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

-Boat music "sea theme", used to be in the boat to Overthere. (i was evil race so I didnt use any other boats)
-When you swam underwater, it played the "underwater" theme
-When you Duck by pressing "D" , there was a "sneaking" theme
-I think Wakening Lands song was taken out, although i am not sure.
- NRO desert music is completely different.
-There used to be 3 random battle songs when you were on combat mode, now when you delete the combat music from the files, you only get one of the old combat midis to play.

The reason I believe they eliminated some songs was because they sounded horrible with newer Operating Systems (Windows XP).

If you hear it in a Windows Media Player it sounds horrible. Unfortunately they let that song slip in game and sometimes I can hear it in Qeynos or one of the good cities. I downloaded a midi player via android and played that same file, and the difference was miles apart. Im now thinking why didnt they convert the old midi to mp3 and included in the newer expansions at the time? How hard or expensive wouldve that been?
If we could bring this to attention, maybe someone in P99 or Daybreak can fix or restore this hidden gem which is an important part of our nostalgia , at least to some of us.

For new player references, here are the MIDI recordings of those.

Underwater midi

Sneaking midi <--- my memory is totally absent on that one.

As for why they didn't convert to MP3, who knows. Perhaps they didn't have it setup like that. You still needed a soundcard with midi capabilities iirc, otherwise you are just playing a recording. Perhaps there was some issue setting the recordings up like the MIDI

Originally Posted by Telin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This is definitely something I'd like to work on. Maybe using an mp3 with a location trigger along the boat route, but some development may be needed.

Why you can't convert between MIDI and audio files?

This is a little rant that has been brewing inside of me for some while now. From time to time I get asked or see questions asked as to how one goes about converting MIDI to audio, and vice-versa. If you search on StackOverflow, you can find literally dozens of questions asking this for practically every programming language out there. And it’s easy to see why. Lots of people want to make some type of music-based software thing, and they need to generate or save some content, and the easiest way to do that is with MIDI files.

There are also tons of half-baked shareware utilities which attempt to do this task (note: at the time of writing, all of these links work, but as most of these products are scams or otherwise dodgy, those links may be broken by the time you read this). Executive summary for the impatient: those programs don’t work, so don’t waste your money on them.

But my point is: you don’t convert MIDI to audio. I’m going to explain why, and what to do instead if you need to do this task. If you already know why, then please kindly bookmark this blog entry and send it to your boss/best friend/grandma the next time you get asked this question.

First of all, let’s start out with some definitions.

MIDI is a protocol. The MIDI protocol defines how music hardware or software, such as computers, synthesizers, controllers, keyboards, drum machines, etc., can talk to each other. MIDI data, when streamed to such a device, allows it to play the notes that make music (among other things). So when people talk about “converting” MIDI to audio, they actually mean converting MIDI files to audio files. MIDI files are simply a way of saving a stream of MIDI data to disk so it can be played back later.

Audio files, such as WAV, MP3, OGG, etc., contain sampled audio data, which is basically a series of digital values which make up the waveform of a sound signal. This raw data is commonly referred to as PCM (pulse code modulation), which is the stuff that makes up WAV and AIFF files. This data can be compressed to MP3 or OGG or some other format via a codec, but that’s a discussion for another day. The point is, everybody knows what an MP3 file is, but it’s not the same thing as MIDI data.

So why do people think that they can convert MIDI data to audio, and vice-versa? Well, that’s simple. You have a MIDI file on your computer, and you can double-click it, and you hear some sounds come out of your speaker. Audio files make sounds, too, and you can easily covert between MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, or whatever. So since MIDI files also make sounds, why can’t they just be converted to MP3?

And therein lies the rub. MIDI files are not sounds, they contain protocol data. When you “play” MIDI files back, you are actually synthesizing this protocol data to an audio stream (hence the term “synthesizer”). So you can synthesize MIDI data to audio, and capture the resulting audio, but it’s not the same thing as converting it. Just to make that point blazingly clear: it’s synthesizing, not converting. Converting is to take the same data and save it in a different format, but synthesizing is to take a set of instructions and to create new output data based on them.

Just for kicks