esselfortium
Cumulonimbus Antagonistic Posting
Posts: 5268
Registered: 01-02 |
Gez said:
PCM recordings aren't more versatile than good old MIDI. Anything you can do with them, you can do with MIDI too because, guess what, after synthesis you have a PCM version of your MIDI song. The reverse is a lot less true. I've given a few examples already. The reason MIDI was dropped was because a lot of people had crappy hardware that made terrible, just terrible rendition of MIDI songs (see also: OPL :p) while disk space -- both on hard drive and on media with the jump from floppies to CDs -- increased immensely. So everyone could be given the exact same sound.
The one advantage of PCM is that you can put actual recordings of real-like stuff, but let's be honest, most game soundtracks are still synthesized from MIDI data by the composer's hardware, rather than sent to flesh-and-bone musicians. Hiring a philharmonic orchestra for your soundtrack is expensive enough to be only affordable by AAA studios.
Ironically, now that the processing power of modern hardware is strong enough to allow a game to run a softsynth, it'd be possible for MIDI to make a return, as by including a softsynth and a soundfont in your game you control the output as much as if you ship it with MP3s.
As a musician, I can't really imagine anyone agreeing to this unless the game was intended for a severely memory/storage-constrained system. Requiring musicians to go completely out of the way of their standard tools and workflow isn't really a great idea unless there's an honest need for it.
Besides, to keep up with the audio quality of pre-rendered music, this would mean having to compute reverb, filters, distortion, delays, EQs, compressors, and any other effects (of which there can be hundreds in a single song) in real time, sapping CPU power from the game in order to do something that could have just been played back from an MP3 file.
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06-18-11 19:16 
