Make EQ's music (MIDI) sound Significantly Better.

[Lilcea]

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

Lilcea, may i ask what this "fix" was exactly? and the name of the soundfount's used if any. I've been trying to get the midi tracks sound like this for a long time and while I'm close, its not a close as this.

Here's an example of how my West Freeport gate track sounds.
https://streamable.com/yhedtx

We took the original instruments with all the timing etc. from the original files that the EQ devs did and combined them with the AWE32 instruments and timings.

We compared the tunes with the fix to my real hardware, my old Pentium with AWE32 sound card. There not just close, they sound exactly the same. So if you played the original EQ with an AWE32 like I did, it should sound the same as it did back in the day.

Assuming no mistakes have been made with the instruments that is [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't have any web hosting any more due to real life shenanigans but I'll try and source something.

Would be great if the P99 team could host it though [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Oh if anyone is interested this also works with the live servers, it worked fine when I was streaming the Agnarr server on Twitch when it launched. I’ve not tested it since then but as long as they have not buggered up the xmi player code too much it should be fine.

[Knuckle]

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

We took the original instruments with all the timing etc. from the original files that the EQ devs did and combined them with the AWE32 instruments and timings.

We compared the tunes with the fix to my real hardware, my old Pentium with AWE32 sound card. There not just close, they sound exactly the same. So if you played the original EQ with an AWE32 like I did, it should sound the same as it did back in the day.

Assuming no mistakes have been made with the instruments that is [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't have any web hosting any more due to real life shenanigans but I'll try and source something.

Would be great if the P99 team could host it though [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Oh if anyone is interested this also works with the live servers, it worked fine when I was streaming the Agnarr server on Twitch when it launched. I’ve not tested it since then but as long as they have not buggered up the xmi player code too much it should be fine.

I mean I think I could share this from my google drive? What are your step by steps we would need to make this happen and to update our game files/midi player.

[Kaa]

I hope this doesn't count as spam but, just popping in here to say that I'm also very interested in getting the MIDIs to work properly -- all 400+ (or whatever it was) of them. Right now it seems like certain melodies are out of key which play alongside melodies in key which is jarring. I'd be extremely grateful as well for a fix. Thanks for working on this all.

Edit: Note that the solution in the original post on this thread no longer works as one of the download links is broken.

[loramin]

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

We took the original instruments with all the timing etc. from the original files that the EQ devs did and combined them with the AWE32 instruments and timings.

We compared the tunes with the fix to my real hardware, my old Pentium with AWE32 sound card. There not just close, they sound exactly the same. So if you played the original EQ with an AWE32 like I did, it should sound the same as it did back in the day.

Assuming no mistakes have been made with the instruments that is [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't have any web hosting any more due to real life shenanigans but I'll try and source something.

Would be great if the P99 team could host it though [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Oh if anyone is interested this also works with the live servers, it worked fine when I was streaming the Agnarr server on Twitch when it launched. I’ve not tested it since then but as long as they have not buggered up the xmi player code too much it should be fine.

How big is this file? The wiki could probably host it (if it doesn't limit files by extension ... I'd have to check), and really the wiki is a better (more permanent) host for the instructions and such than a forum post also.

EDIT: It looks like you just have to use the syntax: [[Media:File.ogg]] (and presumably .zip, or .midi, or whatever would work also).

We already have an https://wiki.project1999.com/Audio_Enhancements page (although it could clearly use some love), and it would be the perfect place to add it. Alternatively you could also add it on its own page, and link to that page from there.

Feel free to PM me if you have questions.

[Maestrobob]

Hi Guys,

I posted this over at TAKP today, I figured I would post it here as well. It seems like Lilcea was down the same path as I was.

Just stumbled across this thread and thought I would share some thoughts and findings on this topic, as I have been researching it for a while.

A little history first - I played EQ in 2000 on a Win98 box with an AWE32 and remember how great the music sounded with this hardware. For years I've looked for ways to get the music sounding as I remember.

SO in the case of the EQ client itself - As mentioned previously; about the time when PoP came out, they removed the clients ability to dynamically switch the soundfont banks into EMU8000 cards. This had to do with them trying to fix the compatibility issue with Windows XP/NT and Creative drivers no longer allowing access to bank switching directly by applications. Windows 9x/DOS allowed for much lower level access to the hardware through the drivers. If you tried to use any period EQ client on a Windows XP/NT/2000 machine, soundfont bank switching would NOT work. Using a Trilogy or Luclin era client on a Win9x box with an AWE32 card and correct drivers should dynamically switch in the proper banks automatically.

Now let's dive into the meat and potatoes of what I've found. Using VirtualMIDISynth, Timidity++ etc. and loading the banks 1mgm.sf2 and synthusr.sf2 in the appropriate manner gets us CLOSE to what it sounded like, but it's not exact. This is because of how synthusr.sf2 relies on the onboard AWE32 ROM (in this case 1mgm.sf2) to patch in missing wavetables. This can be verified by opening synthusr.sf2 into a soundfont editor like Viena.

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Here you can see synthusr.sf2 loaded into Viena. Notice on the left side under "samples" we see a list of !ROM: samples. These are the samples that synthusr.sf2 is expecting to import from the AWE32 ROM. If we click on one, we get an error that it isn't found.

Now let's load up 1mgm.sf2 into Viena - and what do we find? All of the samples synthusr.sf2 is looking for, of course.

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Back to synthusr.sf2 - Now let's look at the instrument presets, and we'll notice that not only do many of the presets use a combination of wavetables - some from synthusr.sf2 and some from 1mgm.sf2, but synthusr.sf2 applies specific parameters to the wavetables from 1mgm.sf2 that cannot be reproduced by loading the soundfonts into a software emulation.

For this example, let's take Brass 1 from synthusr.sf2

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

We can see that this instrument preset combines BrassSectC3 from 1mgm.sf2 4 different times to create a unique sound that's different from just using the preset from 1mgm.sf2 by itself. Every single preset in synthusr.sf2 uses the AWE32 ROM samples in this function. This is also true for all of the drum presets. The limitations of software like VirtualMIDISynth doesn't allow individual wavetable samples to be imported in these cases.

Now what we can do is import and reassign every instrument preset in synthusr.sf2 to use the correct samples, then save the resulting .sf2 out and in this case load it into XMPlay with an original EQ .xmi file. (note: This new .sf2 removes the need to load 1mgm.sf2 at all)

The results speak for themselves - Here are a few tracks using the new .sf2 with correct samples:

Akanon track 1:
https://sndup.net/2kts

Qeynos tracks 2 and 6:
https://sndup.net/5wfj
https://sndup.net/9gn5

West Karana (qey2hh1.xmi track 3)
https://sndup.net/853w

Kaladim tracks 5 and 6 (notorious for sounding terrible with the wrong soundfont)
https://sndup.net/536w
https://sndup.net/59m3

I think you'll notice the extra layers to instruments you'd normally be missing along with the correct percussion sounds. The pieces now sound as close as to what I can remember and how Mr. Jay Barbeau originally intended.

If you want to give it a try, the new .sf2 file is here (I highly recommend XMPlay, as it has built-in soundfont support and you can load up the original EQ .xmi's with all of the subsongs).

As a last note - There is one other variable not taken into account - The EMU8000 on the AWE32 also allowed for hardware effects processing through EAX, which could be applied to soundfonts. I am not 100% sure about how the EQ client went about this, but if someone does get a Win9X box running with a Trilogy or Luclin client and AWE32, it would be interesting to compare results.

Edit: I have dumped all of the .xmi subtracks to .mp3 using this new soundfont. You can find the .zip of them all here. (633 MB)

[kfmonster]

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

You can find the .zip of them all here

This is amazing, thank you!

[Magnus Of Rorck]

I use the FluidR3 or the Arachno soundFont with VirtualMIDISynth and it sounds like a full friggin' orchestra inside my box with Everquest.

[Maestrobob]

The previous .zip had a small issue where my MIDI player was limiting the max reverb per channel to 64 instead of the full 127.

I've recreated them with the correct reverb settings and put them in a .zip -> here

It should be a noticeable improvement for those who just want to listen.

[Scoojitsu]

Those all sound very very nice!

Could you post a quick tutorial on how to get this new sound file into the game?
I installed XMPlay and don't know what to do.
Thank you!!

[Maestrobob]

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

Those all sound very very nice!

Could you post a quick tutorial on how to get this new sound file into the game?
I installed XMPlay and don't know what to do.
Thank you!!

XMPlay is only if you want to listen to the MIDI files outside of the game.

The easiest and quickest method for getting the in game music to sound like this is to use BASSMIDI or VirtualMIDISynth, as outlined by the OP of this thread. Then, instead of using 1mgm.sf2, synthusr.sf2, or a combination of both, load my soundfont I posted earlier and all the in-game music should sound like the mp3s.

As a quick note, VirtualMIDISynth limits the max MIDI reverb and chorus to 64 by default. You will need to go into options and change both to 127.

There is one other way - which involves making the client use mp3 files instead of the .xmi. It's much more complex as you have to edit a ton of .emt files in the EQ folder, but you can see the details of what's involved on this post.