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fishbone

Extracting music the proper way

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Nostalgia hit again and I am revisiting my classic game soundtracks of Doom and Heretic. The problem is, these songs have been exported from the WADs, saved as MIDIs and because of the windows wavetables, they don't sound like the original.
I tried running the games in DOS emulated mode but haven't had much luck.
Any other suggestions? Does anyone happen to have the soundtrack in it's "original form"?

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MIDI is a music sheet. (And yes, the original format, MUS, is just a variant of MIDI. The conversion from MUS to MIDI caused no loss of fidelity or quality.) It doesn't sound like anything. It's the instruments that determine how it sounds.

To have it sound exactly like it did on your old computer, you'd have to play them on your old computer. The sound chipset matters, the sound card matters if it did some post-processing, the amplifier matters, the speakers matter...

For most people, the "original" sound was on some OPL chip. So some ports have OPL emulation. You'll find one in Chocolate Doom, another in ZDoom, for example. But even with these emulators, it will probably not sound like it did "before". It's not a question of extraction, or even of emulation, it's just a question of the rest of the involved hardware not being the same.

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Look on torrent sites for "Doom FLAC". A forum member here LogicDeLuxe is a sound engineer, he played the original tracks through a proper Roland hardware synth like Bobby Prince wrote the songs on. You can convert these FLACs to OGG and play them with any modern sourceport. This is the 100% original and intended way to listen to Doom music.

ZDoom and DOSBox have OPL emulation which makes the music sound like it did on the Yamaha FM Synth chip on the SB16 which is what most people had back in the day. Don't listen to anyone who says these emulations are crap and inaccurate, they are wrong.

Alot of people prefer Timidity with eawpats or shompats instead of the Microsoft Synth, search for these terms on the forums here for info on setting these up. ZDoom Wiki has a page about Timidity.

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Thanks a lot for the help you guys :)
LogicDeluxe's work is nothing short of epic.
I'm off to reading the Timidity docs, I'm momentarily stuck at the part talking about sf2 files (I got eawpats and there's a bunch of .pat files and that's it). My desire is to learn to do this and hopefully apply it to Doom II and Heretic.

Here's the Doom I torrent I was able to find. Hope it's the right one
http://www.torrentz.com/bc05e7b9c81204430bf5eea3e54875e50534d4be

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Alright, so I got Doom covered, now working for Heretic.
I took a different route. I installed Midi Yoke and am using Savihost with the SFZ dll. I got the midis to play just fine through Winamp, but I tried the Silverspring and OPL-3 FM 128 soundfonts and they both sound like shit. I am discouraged because I thought Silverspring was specifically put together for these games.
Thoughts?

I should probably mention I am doing all this using my fantastic on-board Realtek AC97 sound chip.

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fishbone said:

Thoughts?

Every "old hardware" soundfont I've ever found is crap.

The dude over at sycraft.org has a soundfont he's constantly tuning to release good versions of the Doom, Heretic and Hexen soundtracks in MP3. Short of getting a Roland hardware synth or making recordings of ZDoom/DOSBox OPL emulation, these are probably the best Heretic and Hexen soundtracks available

http://sycraft.org/content/audio/index.shtml

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