A discussion on restoring EQ's music once and for all

[km2783]

Originally Posted by Crover_CT99 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm glad you posted this link. I had found it a year or so ago and rejoiced at having a decent set of the original tunes.

I posted about this on the bug section awhile back, but it garnered no interest from the developers.

Anyway, to the OP, if you read the entirety of that post you linked, I believe someone posts a "remake" of either the Qeynos or FP bard guild music which is worth a listen.

"And as a hommage to Jay: here is a sweet, reworked version of the old Qeynos Bardguild midi, done by Leif Chapelle aka Cobalt Katze on the VG forums: http://www.xs4all.nl/~treesong/bardguild.mp3 "

[YendorLootmonkey]

I replaced my combattheme1.mp3 with the "Princes of the Universe" song from Highlander. Sword battles are 10x cooler. I also replaced the death theme with the chorus from "Live and Let Die". That's as much playing around with the music as I have done. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[scecie]

This thread has affirmed for me that I'm not the only nerd who's emotional bond to this blasted game is tied to the music nearly as much as the game-play and friendships that were made.

In fact, I was working in my office when I got the itch to listen to the music. I promptly pulled up the MP3's on my Blackberry and the nostalgia took hold. That inspired me to log into EQemu again, which I had not done in months and my wife came down stairs, heard the login music and said "oh no!".

Additionally, you could just turn off the in-game music and cycle through the MP3 playlist at random...that works almost as good for me!

Thank goodness I'm a responsible gamer now and the wife and kids won't lose daddy to evercrack...much [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Knuckle]

Fun Fact- The little ditty(not the zone theme, this one kicks in near the tunnel entrance/wiz spire area) they play in north ro is alot like the beat to a classic rap song. By one Nelly on the Country Grammar album: Greed, Hate, Envy.

Nelly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEqT7iuDkxc
Everquest: can't find the sound file =/
EQ Pop Culture Trivia for you and yours.

[km2783]

I think me and Ableton Live have a new project.

At a minimum I plan to run the new, dead MP3s through a nice reverb plugin. If anyone wants to send me classic songs from a not as good sound card as an MP3 I'll see what I can do.

Long term, I have much bigger plans that involve those precious MIDI files and some nice samples. I'll probably even start with the Kelethin theme.

What I'm really curious about is can we somehow hybridize this? All the music of the XMI files while using MP3s? Not that any of this will be all that classic :P

I'm looking into this right now >.>

I also recall back in the day I had to eventually buy a SB16 Live or some nonsense as the built-in sound on my HP would crash the client at odd times. It was always a bitch when it happened when Slate hit my Bard lol. This was during... Velious, maybe. I don't recall exactly when it happened. But it's when i discovered the modem was part of the sound card module o.O

**edit** Sadly, that MP3 archive link was no longer good, so I don't have any reference material to work with =/

**edit again** I'm going to make a new thread about "new" music and leave this one alone so it doesn't get too derailed. however, I'm still open to working with MP3s to get them to sound closer to that AWE32 card if anyone is interested.

**edit part 3** I actually found a plugin that emulates the AWE32 card. But it costs $100 =( Found other GM plugins. $100+ lol.

**edit farce** Some of those MIDI tracks are a single track with several parts, others are broken up into several. =/

[grazulis]

Originally Posted by km2783 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

**edit** Sadly, that MP3 archive link was no longer good, so I don't have any reference material to work with =/

Look further down in the thread. Somebody is kind enough to repost the full archive. The new link does work. The individual MP3s are also available directly from http://www.xs4all.nl/~treesong as was pointed out earlier, although do note that the EQmp3.zip at that link does not contain all of the MP3s found in the true archive (missing things like Ak'Anon, Mistmoore, etc.) Also worth noting that while these MP3s represent idealized renditions of EQ's music, they do not cover the entire soundtrack. The midi files archive is more thorough, providing, for example, the several varieties of "eerie" music.

My next attempts at this problem will involve hijacking Windows' midi mapper. Clearly, EQ tells Windows to treat the XMI music as midi. That's the key. Back in the day, this resulted in an Awe32 using its built-in soundbank and reverb. These days it results in Windows using its built-in soundbank (which is bad) and no reverb (which is worse). To reiterate, the process of hijacking this process is reportedly easy in XP, difficult in Vista, and perhaps impossible in 7, as Microsoft removed more and more associated freedoms (probably also forcing more and more musicians onto Macs). But we'll see how it goes. After hijacking the process, all that remains is to forward the midi information to a standalone player with a good soundfont and things like reverb / chorus. I already had success replacing Windows' soundfont, but that turns out not to be the full solution.

[grazulis]

Originally Posted by km2783 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

**edit part 3** I actually found a plugin that emulates the AWE32 card. But it costs $100 =( Found other GM plugins. $100+ lol.

Prompted by this revelation, and somewhat to my amazement, I poked around and managed to find the actual Awe32 GM soundbank in soundfont format. That will be interesting to use as reference if/when I manage to reroute EQ's midi information to a standalone player. I did not, however, find the Awe32 emulator you mention, which would probably, by definition, include the all-important reverb (and whatever else the card did to make that small soundbank sound so good). Have a link?

[km2783]

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

Prompted by this revelation, and somewhat to my amazement, I poked around and managed to find the actual Awe32 GM soundbank in soundfont format. That will be interesting to use as reference if/when I manage to reroute EQ's midi information to a standalone player. I did not, however, find the Awe32 emulator you mention, which would probably, by definition, include the all-important reverb (and whatever else the card did to make that small soundbank sound so good). Have a link?

I may have jumped the gun. It came up when I searched KVR's plugin database for AWE32.

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/2699.html

Apparently here's why:
*Do quality conversion between the instruments formats most common PC synthesizer sound cards. Some examples: SB AWE32, SB Live!, all Vortex II-based cards, TB Pinnacle, TB Maui, AVM Apex, Gravis UltraSound, UltraSound PnP.

It actually does a LOT more, but I don't think it's going to have that reverb. and ew, AWE32 was actually an ISA card hehe. It turns out it used technology from Emu in it's MIDI playback, ie sample-based.

Interesting read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32

So, if you find the AWE32's SoundFont you're most of the way there. There are a LOT of great reverb plugins out there.

Also have you tried MIDI Yoke to shuffle the MIDI around?

[grazulis]

Originally Posted by km2783 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I may have jumped the gun. It came up when I searched KVR's plugin database for AWE32.

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/2699.html

That's Awave Studio - the program I referenced earlier as being one means of converting any of the common SF2 soundbanks into the esoteric DLS Level 1 format which Windows utilizes for midi playback. It doesn't appear easy to determine whether one could use it to play midi from a yoke, but certainly I wouldn't expect it to provide processing like reverb.

So, if you find the AWE32's SoundFont you're most of the way there. There are a LOT of great reverb plugins out there.

Also have you tried MIDI Yoke to shuffle the MIDI around?

I installed MIDI-OX and either this installed MIDI Yoke along with it, or Windows 7 has its own MIDI Yoke built-in (no real way for me to tell, at this point). As it happens, somebody did cleverly produce a tiny hack to enable one to bypass Microsoft's GM wavetable synth and forward the midi information to a yoke. I've fiddled with it and it works (I can monitor the midi data with MIDI-OX). Now what I desperately need to complete the picture is some kind of app that will take this midi information and correctly play it. Once I have everything in place, I will outline the steps I took.

For the time being, the closest I have come is with a free app called Terry West's Take1. It can load big soundfonts, and it includes a reverb of reasonable quality. The only problem is that it is interpreting all the midi notes as piano (or, more probably, failing to interpret them at all, and defaulting to piano, the first patch in any general midi soundbank). I've emailed the author in an effort to determine what can be done. It was only recently that I confirmed to my satisfaction that the midi mapping hack was not responsible for this anomaly (by way of observing the data flow in MIDI-OX). I have not found any other standalone midi players which 1) can load soundfonts, 2) accept midi input from a user-selectable source, and 3) provide crucial effects such as reverb. No doubt multipurpose programs such as FL Studio could be set up to do all this, but that wouldn't be much use to readers here, and the practicality of this exercise would be greatly diminished.

[km2783]

A thought occurred to me. Does anyone know if classic EQ loaded it's own soundfont into the AWE32? Games like Final Fantasy 7 supported this feature of the card.

And I stumbled across a Sound On Sound article from 1994 about the AWE32:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1994...lasterawe.html

Where'd you find the AWE32 SoundFont? I'd like to play around with it in Live [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I've also run across a thread from 2009 with people trying to get the AWE32 sound of Doom working, and weren't having much luck with any SoundFonts [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] They speculated, and from what I've read on the AWE32 they are correct, that the physical card itself has a onboard sounds to pull from, too.

We might have to rely on Mg and his AWE64 for the most accurate results.

**edit** I did find this: http://my.opera.com/Silverspring/hom...ming%201.5.zip

Supposedly a SoundFont made by someone for playing old games. downloading it now just to see. And it is not the file you are looking for =/

**edit 2** but this might be. Experimenting with Live+Kontakt now. http://my.opera.com/Silverspring/blo...awe-rom-gm-set

ugh it keeps crashing Live. Fail.

**edit tree** I just had an "oh shit" moment. I just played the Kelethin MIDI file and it sounded very, very good. Admittedly not exactly like the AWE32 clip posted on page 1 (the string pads aren't as lush or prominent, imo), but DAMNED better than the "other soundcard" clip. details to come.

**edit four** ugh DropBox is taking FOREVER to upload this little MP3. fastest it was moving was 12.8KBps but it's been hovering around 1-3KBps... my internet is NOT this slow =/ Patience...

**Final edit of this post I swear**

Here it is:

Kelethin - Dry, no added reverb from me anyway

Apparently OS X has a nice MIDI soundset. I routed audio from it's preview player and into Ableton Live, recorded it and then exported and converted to a 192kbps MP3. The AWE32 pizzicato is more plucky and sharp, the strings are more prominent and lively, the bass is a little weak, so this isn't quite there yet, but I guess a decent step.

**edit 6** I lied, another edit. One thing I noticed while doing this, is that the AWE32 Kelethin posted on page one is the Kelethin.MID while the "craptacular soundcard" version uses the KelethinFull.MID which has some REALLY cheesy sounding solo lines in it, I guess a MIDI clarinet or oboe or something.

**edit 7** post is getting long... but here's the EQ Theme as performed by the OS X MIDI soundset. I'm listening to Ak'Anon right now [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

What troubles me, though, is those cursed xmi files and the seemingly random number of mp3 files as well. It's like some are going to play MIDI, some songs are mp3 and it's somewhat annoying.