playing old midi files but with yamaha sound or else?

[Caine123]

i wanted to play some old midi files again from duke nukem 3d, blood etc. i love those a lot! i had a yamaha XG card in the pat, was the best midi sound i had, after an old sounblaster 16 and the AWE 32 which was also cool the yamaha XG was superior i think.

but how can i maybe emulate different chips to play midifiles? when i play them now in winamp of course it is a standard win midi sound now.

nostalgia

[BertKoor]

http://www.sf2midi.com/soundfonts/file- ... -3993.html maybe?

[Caine123]

http://www.sf2midi.com/soundfonts/file- ... -3993.html maybe?

got it but when i import in fl studio for example how can i set it that it will find the specific sounds automatically? and any way that winamp plays it with different midi sound like the XG sound and not standard microsoft sound?

[BertKoor]

Sorry, can't help with FLStudio. If you still had that AWE64 card, you could use the soundfont on that native.

I suppose the XG soundfont is remapped to be GM compatible and your Midi files use the GM patch numbers as well. Then if your soundfont player works alright (e.g. sfz should be OK) then there should be no issue at all.

Regarding WinAmp, that connects to a SoftSynth provided by Windows. On WinXP it uses the file c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\gm.dls. That is comparable to a soundfont, and there are tools (eg AWave Studio) to convert. Alas I know of no way to safely replace the .dls file of Windows. Have tried in the past for a day and had to give up. So you have to use another Midi file player that can be connected to a soundfont plugin. Or try googling "how to change dls on windows gm synth" which led me to this article.

[fmr]

http://www.sf2midi.com/soundfonts/file- ... -3993.html maybe?

got it but when i import in fl studio for example how can i set it that it will find the specific sounds automatically? and any way that winamp plays it with different midi sound like the XG sound and not standard microsoft sound?

That SoundFont seems to have more than the regular 128 GM sounds, although not exactly the circa 500 siunds that the XG soundset comprehends.
However, to take advantage of more than 128 soundbanks, you ned to have a SoundFont Player that responds to Bank change messages (CC 00 and/or CC 32), not only prgoram change messages. Not sure of there is any.
But there is a solution. Cakewalk Sonar X1 comes with a virtual instrument that conforms to GM2 (and GS). Although GM2 is inferior to XG, it has much more sounds than GM, and that instrument responds to Bank messages. The sound too is not bad, if you process it. To my knowledge, that's tne best solution you have to play those MIDI files

[BertKoor]

I doubt midi files that old contain bank change messages, but who knows...
Anyway, the perceived quality of soundfonts is all in the used samples where usually bigger means better. I recall when I still had the SB64AWE I could tinker with selecting which of the three synth engines did a better job on a particular track. More to chose from leverages the quality.

In hindsight, I wouldn't know weather the sounds on Roland SoundCanvas, Roland JV-series, Yamaha XG-series or Gravis UltraSound are any better than the other. I guess it depends what you're used to

[fmr]

Yamaha XG-series or Gravis UltraSound are any better than the other. I guess it depends what you're used to

Yamaha XG vs Gravis Ultrasound, and you couldn't tell which one was better? You are joking, right?

[BertKoor]

That was a little tongue-in-cheek joke, referring to how the typical GUS user drooled and hyperventilated when comparing midi sounds
And ofcourse when comparing a $100 card with 512KB of samples to a $500 card with 4MB of samples, it's simple to predict the winner.