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

[grazulis]

A long time ago (1999, roughly), I got my copy of EQ, a couple of days after everyone else. To this day, some of my most vivid memories of that day revolve around the game's music. The uplifting tune when encountering the Gfay wizard spires. The mellow, nostalgic merchant music. The simple but appropriate desert music of Nro - which can now only be heard on Project 1999, incidentally.

I had the good fortune and luck to have a SB Awe32 in my pc at the time. Not only was the built-in soundbank quite a good one (for being so small), but the card also provided all-important reverb, without which ANY midi tune sounds hollow and dull.

As has been briefly touched upon in at least one other thread, you can hear EQ's old midi music, but you'll still have to have one of those old, discontinued soundcards available (in addition, it seems, to an older OS) if you want acceptable playback quality.

The reason for this is simple. Windows Vista / 7 both make use of a tiny (~3MB) GM wavetable synth soundbank when playing midi files. The poor quality of the soundbank is one of the culprits, but by far the biggest problem is the total absence of reverb.

As it happens, considerable hunting around has produced a solution to one of the problems. It is possible to replace the default soundbank with another. Easy in XP, not so much in Vista / 7. You have to find "gm.dls" in your windows directory structure (I know of two copies of said file in Windows 7) and replace them with an alternative DLS file.

Two problems. First, the DLS soundbank format is essentially unsupported, meaning you won't be finding good soundbanks on the net. At least I didn't. A solution is to acquire Awave Studio and use it to convert any of the plethora of SF2 soundbanks into the DLS level 1 format. Second problem is that in Vista / 7, the original gm.dls file is protected, and normally it is extremely tricky to make the file modifiable without somehow messing up your OS. Fortunately, research led me to a handy registry script which adds a file takeover option to your right-click menu (Google "take ownership"). Works like a charm.

Unfortunately, no matter how good a given soundbank is, without reverb, there's just something missing - something critical. Take EQ's gypsy music (can be heard in the grassy area of Nro). It's got a percussive element which sounds great with reverb, but otherwise sounds rather like somebody tapping two wooden pegs together.

Sadly, this is where my information hits a dead end, for now. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no way to force Windows' midi playback process to implement effects like reverb. However, there may be some means of rerouting midi playback through a yoke and into a standalone midi player which does the job properly (or, obviously, some kind of external midi device, if one wishes to go there). A big part of the point behind this post is to see if anyone's toyed around with this and perhaps already developed a solution.

Time is of the essence. To the best of my memory, in the entire classic/Kunark/SoV run, only classic exhibited a wide variety of music for various locations and situations. I think Kunark was 100% devoid of music, and SoV had maybe a tune at the ferrets or something. Soon enough, Project 1999 will be as musically bankrupt as EQ became. I hope to find a solution in time to enjoy the game more fully like I remember, and there are probably others who feel the same.

Side note: Classic EQ had three (midi) battle tunes, and picked one randomly when entering combat. Project 1999 plays the same tune every time. Does anyone know a fix for this?

[eqdruid76]

Honestly, the sound card in my computer back in 1999 was a complete POS, and the game music sputtered, skipped and froze on notes to the point I turned it off an kept if off. I'm thankful just to be able to hear the tunes at all now. :P

[Akame]

Yea I'd gotten sick of the attack music by the 3rd day and turned the sound off, only turned it back on a few times years later when someone said this zone music was cool. I'm afraid I have no clue how to help you.

[rioisk]

I thought the music was amazing back then too. You're right...EQ didn't do enough with music in kunark and velious. =(

[Flicka]

The music that does play in some areas is just frightening. Like the Rivervale tune? I used to LOVE just sitting in RV (usually fishing) and chatting and mellowing out. Now it's some jiggy demon spawned beat that is kinda scary after a few minutes, LOL. I don't know how or why it's different, but it is!

[binibren]

There may be an easier solution. If you can find someone with old hardware and an AWE32 -- I just tossed mine about 6 months ago [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] -- you can run all of the midis through winamp and output them to mp3 files. You can then replace the sound files in Titanium. It's been a while since I've messed around with the Titanium client but I *think* it supports both mp3 and midi.

For those who were not so lucky as to have played EQ with an AWE32 here is what Kelethin sounded like with that magical sound card:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atHxsHPt7Fc

Here is Kelethin with "normal" sound card:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO4_8A9Uiwg

[PearlJammzz]

That awe32 version rocks! Someone needs to go through, and convert all the midi's to mp3's that sound like that. Muhc more...vibrant, and alive. Not as dull as the music now.

titanium only supports mp3's I thought?

[Dawgrin]

Wow I never knew what I was missing...I would LOVE to hear all the EQ music in this format...does anyone happen to have all the other music files likewise converted to MP3s?

[PearlJammzz]

My understanding is you need that special midi card (or at least supported-style card?) to be able to read the midi files like that. If you have one of those you can then convert the songs into mp3's w/ use of a program (record the output maybe is a worse-case scenario?). From there we can just download MP3 pack, and then be able to swap out the mp3 files that are currently in our directory.

[grazulis]

I've been plugging away at this problem and here's an update.

This thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/po...opic_id=115730

reveals that someone had contact with the composer of EQ's music. At the bottom of the thread, somebody has reposted an MP3 archive which was presumably acquired straight from the composer. Inside the archive are renditions of the music which are about as good as I have ever heard.

It has been suggested that one can replace EQ's .XMI (midi) files with like-named MP3s. I'm not so certain of this. The other thing revealed in the above thread - which I determined for myself prior to stumbling upon that discussion - is that many (most?) of EQ's music is literally hidden away. For example, GL.XMI is EQ's battle music. If you play this file with Winamp, you'll hear the very battle music which Project 1999 plays whenever one enters combat. However, if you skip ahead 1/3rd into the tune (and again at 2/3rds), you will also hear the other two battle themes which Project 1999 does not play. These used to play randomly when entering combat. And there are a lot of examples of this... many tunes stored in a single .XMI file. Even the opening EQ theme itself is hidden halfway into FREPORTN.XMI.

For anyone who ever wanted the entire soundtrack in a reasonably accessible format, the above thread also includes a .MID pack which was created by isolating each of the parts hidden in the .XMI files and creating separate .MID files out of them. All one then needs is a midi player which does a better job than the built-in soundbank utilized by Windows.

But back to the issue of getting this great music to actually play in EQ.

This thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/po...opic_id=146016

makes apparent something which I never personally found out, as I quit EQ for good shortly after Luclin's introduction. Evidently, when the Planes of Power got released, EQ's music was changed for good. Many MP3s were introduced, and we have clear-cut file names like EQTHEME.MP3 and FREEPORT.MP3. I happen to have discovered the complete filelist of mp3s and looked it over. As it happens, there are far fewer individual tunes than what was made available via the .XMI system with its multiple tunes per file, and this may help explain anomalies such as the no-longer-random battle music. Would Everquest Titanium play these MP3s if they were present? Who knows.

I may someday decide to scratch an itch and get my old Velious installed so I can shanghai the eqgame.exe and use it to replace Titanium's eqgame.exe. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to expect this not to work, but just imagine if it would. No more "ebon crystals" in your inventory. Battle music would be properly random. Missing tunes would be back (just listen to those MP3s in the first linked thread)!