how can i "midi-fy" music, making it compatible with general midi?

[memes4lyfe]

i am making a dos compatible wad with custom midi music. i would like to use the quake 2 OST, but i don't know how to convert it into that format. is there any software i can use?

[Alper002]

Outside of using a midi editor to recreate the music you want to use, you're gonna need to either ask someone else to do it, or find a midi file which recreates said music. Since MIDI files are just a list of notes and instruments, while CD audio stores the actual soundwaves, converting automatically is impossible.
 

www.vgmusic.com has a collection of midi versions of tons of game music. I even found a section for quake 2 in this page. Just ctrl + f "Quake II" and you'll find some midis for your own use.

[Gez]

Think of MIDI as a text file, and recorded audio (MP3, OGG, WAV, CD, whatever) as a page scan. The scan is an image, and preserves all details of font style, layout, etc. but you don't have any character on it, you can't do the kind of things you could do with plain text. On the other hand, if you print out a text file on three different computers, you'll get three printed pages that look very different in terms of layout, fonts, etc. And finally, you can try to pass the scanned page through an Optical Character Recognition software, but it'll likely requires you to go behind it and do a proofreading pass because of all the things it will get wrong.

 

With music, it's the same. Except that while nearly everyone can proofread a page and copy a text with a keyboard, very few people can copy a song to MIDI; and software that analyzes audio streams to try to replicate it in MIDI are even less reliable than the average OCR software from twenty years ago.

 

Also there are plenty of sound effects that MIDI simply cannot recreate. To continue our analogy, compare this image with the text below:

          ____  
        o8%8888,    
      o88%8888888.  
     8'-    -:8888b   
    8'         8888  
   d8.-=. ,==-.:888b  
   >8 `~` :`~' d8888   
   88         ,88888   
   88b. `-~  ':88888  
   888b ~==~ .:88888 
   88888o--:':::8888      
   `88888| :::' 8888b  
   8888^^'       8888b  
  d888           ,%888b.   
 d88%            %%%8--'-.  
/88:.__ ,       _%-' ---  -  
    '''::===..-'   =  --.

Yeah. That's what you should expect, at best, when "converting" to MIDI.

Edited August 6, 2019 by Gez

[printz]

Something makes me think this is possible but requires a lot of artificial intelligence. I'd search for any attempts made so far.

 

I'd look for something that only attempts to create MIDI tracks from musical sounds of known instruments. It shouldn't attempt to reproduce any noise or animal voice, other than well-known percussion effects or the "choir aah" instruments and similar.

Edited August 6, 2019 by printz

[DuckReconMajor]

I don't know if this directly answers the question, and I'm not sure what the folks in the video used, but I just wanted to post this

 

 

Edit: just remembered I found this video from this post

Edited August 6, 2019 by DuckReconMajor

[Casketkrusher]

You can't convert music to Midi, you need to compose them yourself. Or find them if someone made a midi version out of it. 

[fraggle]

It's not possible to do what you're asking.

[The Nate]

There actually, is a program that converts WAV files to MIDI and actually make them sound good. The catch is that the music in the WAV can only be one instrument, so no, you can't use it for this.

http://www.pluto.dti.ne.jp/~araki/amazingmidi/

[MFG38]

3 hours ago, Casketkrusher said:

You can't convert music to Midi

 

You can, but 99.999% of the time, the result is a horrendous-sounding barrage of MIDI piano notes. You're better off either finding a pre-existing MIDI rendition or sequencing one yourself.

[yakfak]

an even better way than sequencing one yourself is to pay someone who's more handy with sequencing technology to do it for you

[memes4lyfe]

okay, so MIDI is out of the question now. what about sound blaster?

[Edward850]

13 minutes ago, memes4lyfe said:

okay, so MIDI is out of the question now. what about sound blaster?

What? 

[memes4lyfe]

is there a way to play the quake 2 OST on a SoundBlaster?

[memes4lyfe]

or a SoundCanvas?

[Alper002]

That requires a MIDI file, silly! Soundblaster used midi files to play its' music! Other formats may also have been used, but I'm currently not aware of which ones.

vgmusic.com has some quake 2 midis that you can download and use for yourself! Sure, you can't use whichever track you want, but you get to have quake 2 midis!

[Loud Silence]

 @memes4lyfe I want to play CDs with Vinyl player. How i could do it?

[memes4lyfe]

I think I see where this is going.

is there a MIDI rendition of Kill Ratio anywhere?

[Shadow Hog]

I always found the MIDI conversion more convincing if you change the piano instrument to a sine wave one (if the MIDI synth supports GS instruments, anyway; Ocarina would have to suffice if it only has GM). Then it just sounds like a stupidly-low-bitrate MP3 or something.

 

23 hours ago, memes4lyfe said:

I think I see where this is going.

is there a MIDI rendition of Kill Ratio anywhere?

Yes.