How would I go about making a doom soundtrack?

[Trexion]

This is a question I've had for a long time, and I'm hoping someone can answer it. One thing I do know is that the majority of them are in midi format, but what would the structure of all the instruments in a single midi file be? Is it true that drums can only be played on a certain scale?

[Borg]

Depends on how you build the song. If you use a DAW, digital audio workstation, just build your music in a normal manner. Then render it to an mp3 and import via Slade3. Then use  MAPINFO but I don't know what your situation is.

[slugger]

In my experience, GZDoom and choco-render-limits (and by extension Chocolate Doom) can be reliably expected to play whatever MIDIs you throw at it, even if the drums aren't on the normal channel (which I believe is a problem in some of the midi files I've downloaded). As for the vanilla EXEs, I cannot help you there. They use the MUS format, for the conversion of which you can use the tool MIDI3MUS (see below). As Borg explained you can also use mp3s in the ports which support it.

Edited December 24, 2021 by slugger

[Dusty_Rhodes]

1 minute ago, slugger said:

In my experience, GZDoom and choco-render-limits (and by extension Chocolate Doom) can be reliably expected to play whatever MIDIs you throw at it, even if the drums aren't on the normal channel (which I believe is a problem in some of the midi files I've downloaded). As for the vanilla EXEs, I cannot help you there. They use the MUS format, for the conversion of which you can use the tool MIDI3MUS. As Borg explained you can also use mp3s in the ports which support it.

Actually the vanilla executables have supported internal midi - mus conversion since 1.6, I  believe.

[Trexion]

2 hours ago, Borg said:

Depends on how you build the song. If you use a DAW, digital audio workstation, just build your music in a normal manner. Then render it to an mp3 and import via Slade3. Then use  MAPINFO but I don't know what your situation is.

 

1 hour ago, slugger said:

In my experience, GZDoom and choco-render-limits (and by extension Chocolate Doom) can be reliably expected to play whatever MIDIs you throw at it, even if the drums aren't on the normal channel (which I believe is a problem in some of the midi files I've downloaded). As for the vanilla EXEs, I cannot help you there. They use the MUS format, for the conversion of which you can use the tool MIDI3MUS. As Borg explained you can also use mp3s in the ports which support it.

But, would mp3 work in most source ports or just the more advanced ones like gzdoom?

[Dusty_Rhodes]

36 minutes ago, Trexion said:

 

But, would mp3 work in most source ports or just the more advanced ones like gzdoom?

Yep, if want to use MP3 in GZDoom you can. Although, I'd recommend converting them to .ogg files, those can be played in Chocolate Doom, PrBoom+/UMAPINFO, ZDoom, GZDoom, and others, though I'm no 100% sure.