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[Matt_H]

Originally Posted by desiv

That's weird, because I didn't have any midi OUT devices, but I swear I remember it playing files???

You sure it doesn't have some default way of playing MIDI files? I know I heard it playing music..

I'll have to dig it up and try it again????

desiv

Deluxe Music (speaking from experience with version 2, never used the original) has 2 ways to do MIDI. The first is "real" MIDI, with a hardware box, and I think it works through CAMD. The second is to just load in a MIDI file and reassign its instruments to IFF/8SVX samples. You can then re-save the file in the Amiga-native SMUS or CMUS format. The latter option comes with the limitations of Paula, of course. Most noticeable is the 4-voice limit, which manifests as notes being dropped if something is playing on a higher number of channels.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

Deluxe Music (speaking from experience with version 2, never used the original) has 2 ways to do MIDI. The first is "real" MIDI, with a hardware box, and I think it works through CAMD. The second is to just load in a MIDI file and reassign its instruments to IFF/8SVX samples. ...

OK, that makes sense... I know I used it to play MIDI files, but the memory was a bit rusty beyond that... ;-) I still think I'll fire it up to see, since it's sparked my interest now...

Funny, I remember I wrote my one and only song on that software. It took about a week, and it was kind of techno sounding... It wasn't great, but I was happy with it...

Then I played it for my roommate, who said, "Isn't that the Dr. Who theme?"

To which I said.. "Damnit!! It IS the Dr. Who theme," basically..
Such was the end to my music career.

desiv

[paul1981]

Yes, there is a program to play midi files on your amiga...and it's bloody good as well. Makes GMPlay sound like a toy...

http://aminet.net/package/mus/midi/AmiTiMiDity

This thing uses AHI...
You'll need an 060 to play in real time, but MY GOD IT'S GOOD!
If you don't have the cpu power, you can have it create a wav file instead so that even lower cpu's can enjoy the quality of playback.

I recommend you download this archive too:

http://aminet.net/package/mus/midi/Timidity270

It contains 3 superb midi files to test you player on.

[bubblebobble]

Deluxe Music can assign some midi channels to samples, that's right. But that doesn't mean it can play General MIDI files straight away. It doesn't even know what GM is, it was released before the GM Standard was defined.
You would need to manually pick up samples that suit the instruments and remove as many musical notes that it fits the 4-voice Paula "synthesizer". Pretty much the same as if you would use a tracker.

MIDI Playback can be damn expensive, much more expensive than an mp3, it depends what features are supported and what not. If you cut it down to MOD specs, like 8bit samples, 4 Channels and no effects what so ever, it can be played. But that requires manual adjustment to give reasonable output. If you do this automatically, the result will be probably very bad, depeding on the .mid file of course.
If you have a .mid file that uses only 4 voices at a time, it can be perfectly mapped to a MOD. If it uses 50 or 100 voices, you need to manually decide which instruments are less important an can be dropped, and where to "steal" the voice when there are not enough available.

With the 16 "channels" in my above posting I ment, that a device needs to be able to play 16 voices at the same time to be allowed to carry the GM logo.
Don't mix this up with the 16 MIDI channels, this is the "number of tracks" you can use, but they don't necessarily need to play all at the same time. On the other hand, unlike a MOD, one track can play as many musical notes as it wants, while a MOD can play only 1.

Btw, the MIDI format is much more powerful than MOD, this is a common misunderstanding. It just doesn't come with samples. If you use bad samples, it sounds ridicoulus of course, while within a MOD the samples are choosen by the composer and do always fit. If you don't use General MIDI, it isn't even defined what samples/instruments to use. MIDI was just never ment to share the instruments (and therefore be dependent on a certain format of handling instruments), just the musical notes.
E.g. when you compose music using real (analog) synthesizers, there is no sample involved during the generation of the actual audio, so how could you store this in the .mid file? Think of a .mid file like some musical notes printed out on paper.

[klx300r]

@ paul1981

thanks for the link!..AmiTimidity gives truly great sound :-)

[gertsy]

Wow good stuff Paul....

Ohh no I can see more time is gonna be sucked up here... "AmiTimidity! AmiTimidity!"