Using music from other games

[Nihlith]

Bit off a lot for a newbie. I'm building a Mega Wad with something like a 160 some odd monsters, all custom weapons and so on. I want the wad to have music from other video games from around the same period of time as the original Doom release. I can use SLADE to rip music from the core games but if I wanted to put music from an ULIMA title into a wad, how would I best go about it? Thank you so much anyone who is interested in addressing this! 

[ViolentBeetle]

Doom proper supports MIDIs, if you have a MIDI you want to add to the wad you just import it and rename to match the track associated with the level it's supposed to be associated with. Here's a table for file names for Doom II

 

I think advanced ports support ogg or mp3 tracks but you need to right-click on the lump to covert and idgames doesn't approve of non-MIDIs as far as I am aware.

[Nihlith]

3 hours ago, ViolentBeetle said:

Doom proper supports MIDIs, if you have a MIDI you want to add to the wad you just import it and rename to match the track associated with the level it's supposed to be associated with. Here's a table for file names for Doom II

 

I think advanced ports support ogg or mp3 tracks but you need to right-click on the lump to covert and idgames doesn't approve of non-MIDIs as far as I am aware.

 

How would I convert an mp4 into a MIDI? I'm using GZDoom and SLADE. It would be super cool if I could just take music from youtube. I've been noticing alot of cool music from old games I don't have.

[NiGHTMARE]

14 hours ago, Nihlith said:

 

How would I convert an mp4 into a MIDI?

 

By listening to the MP4 repeatedly whilst recreating it from scratch in a MIDI composition program.

 

Automated conversion from MP4 to MIDI is only slightly less possible than turning a house back into a set of blueprints. Maybe someday there will be AI programs which can do it, but I don't think we're there etc.

 

Most PC games from that era would have used MIDI originally anyway, and for console games and those PC games which didn't there's a good chance someone else has already made MIDI versions of its music. https://www.vgmusic.com/ should be your first port of call, but if there's something you're looking for which isn't there just do a Google search.

[RichardDS90]

You can actually also use raw music formats for source ports like GZDoom such as SNES' SPC and Genesis' VGM formats as well if it's any help to you.

[Zillah]

Midi is basically a virtual piece of sheet music. It reads the sheet of music, and plays it back to you with a certain sound depending on the soundfont. You cannot convert any other music format to midi, it's not possible. Any converter just detects the most common notes and puts it all on one piano roll, hence the usual earrape you'll find yourself buried deep in. If your looking for high-quality midis, here's a few good sites you can use. And if you have a musician for a friend, they may be open to recompose the piece you'd like in Midi.

Sites:
http://en.midimelody.ru/
www.vgmuseum.com/mrp/multi/mp3s.htm
https://www.vgmusic.com/

[Doomkid]

You can find loads of Guitar Pro and Power Tab files on ultimate-guitar.com and convert them to MIDI format using TuxGuitar. Sometimes I have trouble finding a MIDI I want on other sites, but I can find it on ultimate-guitar.

 

Of course, there are other great MIDI sites to search as well:

https://bitmidi.com/

https://freemidi.org/

https://www.midiworld.com/

https://www.vgmusic.com/

http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php

https://doomshack.org/midi.html

[eharper256]

And of course; there is the apparently taboo response around here: MP3's, WAV's, OGGs and FLACs all work fine in advanced ports. I'm a GZDoomer and it has no issue recognising these.

 

The only obvious problem is that, unlike MIDI, actual recorded tracks are considerably larger, so you will inflate the filesize a fair bit. As noted, MIDI are effectively sheet music as opposed to a CD recording.

[Nihlith]

This is all excellent stuff guys. Thank you. I'm going to have a time looking through these resources. So far I'm only finding youtube links at vgmusic. Is that a feature or a bug?

[eharper256]

12 hours ago, Nihlith said:

This is all excellent stuff guys. Thank you. I'm going to have a time looking through these resources. So far I'm only finding youtube links at vgmusic. Is that a feature or a bug?

Though I'm not aware of the site particularly, you can find various browser extensions to download youtube content if you look around, and quite often convert it into WAV or OGG in the process, at least for Firefox (and I don't see why Chrome wouldn't have similar things), so that would be the way forwards if you wanted to use that content specifically, assuming there was not an easier way.

[NiGHTMARE]

I'm struggling to find any Youtube links on VGMusic at all. Every page I've checked just had MIDIs.

[Nihlith]

On 9/17/2020 at 11:48 AM, NiGHTMARE said:

I'm struggling to find any Youtube links on VGMusic at all. Every page I've checked just had MIDIs.

 

I think I see what you're talking about. There's a list of links on the left organized by game system that leads to a bunch of MIDIs. I was going straight through the search function and finding things like this: https://ocremix.org/song/25172/vesper

 

I see that's not on the website but the search function was so big and center I thought that was the main fair.

[j4lambert]

The timeframe for the MIDIs that are being discussed is from 1993–1997, but regarding the Doom WADs that are in use, the Doom series was very popular between 1993 and 2006. Towards the latter end of that period, KraiSoft released four games that had MIDI music composed by Vakhtang Adamiya: Astrobatics, Atomaders, Alien Sky, and After the End. Only the first game had any music used in a Doom II  wad. The other three did not. The MIDIs for the other three games are found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbCUZ_MjvXs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03lKyyfxbwA, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOU4ZvYIQdU.