Distortion Dog

After 5 months, I am ready to release the latest iteration of Miracle2 to the public. This release includes an alternative soundfont: Miracle2C. Its intended to resemble the more traditional SC55/MSGS tones, for whoever is interested! Videos Both contain all the additional SC55 instruments (MT32 bank is yet to come) Input is greatly appreciated, as always! Download Miracle2 Download Miracle2C Previous Releases

"Snowball" Is now live! I have been working on this for some time, and I believe this is the right time to present Miracle2C. Now, the original M2 now aims for a different sound, as I felt I was being closed off by the prospect of staying too faithful to the Roland sound. Miracle2C exists for the opposite reason: I wanted to take a shot at doing a SC55 soundfont, but I always felt some of the Roland instruments were kind of dull, so there are some rare deviations. Overall however, its purpose is simple: to be better than the MS GS SoftSynth :-) Miracle2 here Miracle2C here I wish everyone happy holidays, and a happy new year!

Hey look, a topic I can talk about: I found this file while searching for NIN midis in 2019, and honestly I just kept it saved because of how horrid it sounds. This is legitimately the most depressing MID file I've ever heard. According to the person hosting these (@.paulogy on twitter) "Even though they're not exactly the original songs, for the file size, you can't beat it." SPIRAL.zip

Interesting! I'll be sure to check them out later, but largely this has been purely coincidental! Anyhow, I just made another demo, something more refreshing for this summer:

Miracle 2 is finally here; I've been working on this for a year now and I believe it's done enough for release. From now on all the releases will be separated by dates instead of version numbers, as for the older 1.x versions, they're now under the Old ver. spoiler. There are a lot of changes, most particularly the filesize increase due to higher sample usage, I believe I found a sweet spot as to regards of sample rate and sample count. Here's Doom's EP1, for demonstration: Download

I don't know why, but for some reason the native Zandronum Linux binaries runs worse than running the Windows binaries under Wine. I can generally get good performance from the Win EXE but when I run the application provided by the PPA, it performs badly, even at a low resolution. Has anyone run into this? I doubt it's my system, I can run GZDoom natively quite well.

Link has been updated, changelog below

I purged every non-55 GS Presets so I can focus on tuning the GM presets first. As for changes: There's still a lot of other stuff I need to work on (the ethnic instruments, SFX samples, sharper modular synth samples, 55-style or XGlite editions?), but I still require input from people to know if I'm doing something right.

Miracle2 RC1 I'll make recordings later today, but this is basically where I want to go. Test it out and let me know if there's something off.

Well I tried it out, it doesnt make much difference. I guess BASSMIDI has a different approach to Chorus. I'll go back to the drawing board

Hey, just a little quick question: does any of you turn on chorus on Fluidsynth? I bet you don't, it sounds awful. But a lot of my instruments use chorus, the synth brasses specifically, and it sounds fine in BASSMIDI.

I like my tacos. Beef, chicken, shrimp, fish, you name it. Salsa, pico de gallo. Authentic? Texmex? Does it matter? Tacos are tacos, they're very good. Unless it's got raw avocado.

I've definitively tinkered with masquerade55 a lot, I actually tried to make something similar with jst Scc1t2.sf2 as a basis. It's a little wonky though. I like the mixing, but i feel like they're a bit too much for the soundfont. It takes about 2 MBs of space on its' own, partly because of the high samplerate, but also because they're stereo, so they have two samples per range. The long release is cool though. I'm definitively gonna check that out :D I'll edit this post with the tests later

It wouldn't hurt if I linked the one of my own :]

Oh hey, I've haven't been here in a while. Let's fix that. That is true, I may have set the dulcimer a bit too low on the decay? Yeah, the sample is kinda shite and perhaps I could replace it for something else. I've heard some soundfont use the doom shotgun sound, which I find very distracting because of association. I do have a suitable substitute though. Well, my mentality is that I feel like a lot of GM/GS soundfonts out there are either too big for no reason or too loud/badly for their own good. Despite that, MIRACLE did not start as a quality soundfont ̣- I originally started with the EMU APS 1mb (aka the AWE32/64 ROM soundbank) and kind of tried to keep it small and reliable, however at some point I found that task to be ridiculous since I was scoping for the full 88pro preset list. And thats kind of where were at right now. A lot of the instruments come from SCVA in 8820 mode (the panflute, bottle, and space voice/solo vox/brightness sounds are my favorites!) but a lot of them are from Creative's soundfonts (some were handpicked for filesize management), and there are some fun examples too (eg. the timpani comes from this Aureal GM bank, plenty of snare and bass drums come from Shan's GM, just shortened and compressed a bit). A lot of the synth presets can vary from Roland-esque (most leads), to more liberal takes on the pads (the Fantasia preset is inspired by the copycat from the Proteus/1, while the Bowed Glass is a mix between a Yamaha and a SB Live) But generally? I feel like it's that I've been using the Roland GMGS dls file (the one that comes with every installation of Windows since 98) for volume balancing, perhaps others might have done it as well, but a lot of the time it sounds like people just balance it at their own accord (Timbres of Heaven, Arachno, GeneralUser, Omega, just to name a few). The best way to approach design of a soundfont/soundbank is that a lot of MIDIs will be made for whatever people have on their computers. At some point that was the OPL2 or clones of it, but nowadays it's most likely to be the MS softsynth. As for now, I do feel like I should say that I have dropped my goal of making it 88pro compatible (because 1. it's a lot of work, 2. people who want to hear 88pro MIDIs probably already have SCVA or an 88pro/8850/8820 of their own), and I've been doing a lot of soundfonts on the meantime. Yeah, I'll eventually will drop those some day. I do also plan to make little variations of them to accomodate for the MS softsynth's lack of non-chromatic percussions and instruments. Perhaps also make a GM2-compatible version. In the meantime however, I need to re-setup my workflow, as about a month ago I lost a lot of stuff because of a Windows Update. Safe to say, it's been tough, but I'm better off with Ubuntu and Wine. And, maybe I could do a tutorial on how to make (or tweak) a soundfont, perhaps.

Quite a bit, they're cleaner sampled, unlike almost all of the sample pack. My biggest gripe is with the electric guitars, they are all sampled around F2 or somewhere like that, which sounds terrible for anything but low notes. Apart from that, I've been having to layer sounds (not very Paula-friendly!!) because a lot of the essential GM sounds rely on that + a Lot of filtering (also not very Paula-friendly), and that most samples are hard to loop because of the very nature of how Amiga music is.

I do believe I had made a soundfont with ST-XX samples, but it has a placeholder drumkit and i couldn't find good replacements for some instruments by using the search bar. Woe.

The Lost Levels' existance can be traced to the single fact that Miyamoto was fascinated by making tough levels for Vs. Super Mario Bros, rather than having to make an bigger and better game than the original SMB, because at the same time, he was working on his own Big New Game. It also is Takashi Tezuka's debut as main director and game designer, his second title as a director being SMB3. It felt more like another challenge rather than a new experience, and that's is how I feel about Doom 2. (In fact, I remember you saying about how it was a lot like The Lost Levels in the old "beta" levels, with tougher enemies appearing as early as MAP02)

Well, you play either Doom or Doom 2. It's not that hard to figure out. The thing is, while most sequels are quite different from the first game, Doom 2 is in this weird position where it's sufficiently different from Doom to be considered a sequel, but not by much. It's got new levels and demons, sure, but it feels and plays like a juiced-up version of Doom, rather than it standing as it's own product. Very much like Super Mario Bros and "The Lost Levels", really.

Is Doom 2 a Sequel? Yes it is. Is it a PROPER Sequel? Not really. As much as I prefer the one-shot nature of the game, as well as it's welcome additions, it's very clear that much thought was put into it, probably to focus on planning out that "Quake and Quiver" game. The other id Tech 1 games are quite a glimpse of what a better sequel could have been. But , I can't understate how much of an impact Quake has left on the western industry as a whole, so I don't think I could be lamenting about it.

Well, I am pretty sure that soundfont in that video isn't the Arachno soundfont. Far from it, in fact: its 2MBGMGSMT.SF2, which is one of the three soundfonts that Creative Labs made for the AWE32/AWE64 line, and continued to do so until the X-Fi cards came around. It's pretty small, so it's fine for low RAM usage. ... Unless you are refering to the fade-out, that is just a video editing effect.

Well, I have a couple of ones that mimic some old hardware, mostly tuned up versions of pre-existing soundfonts (i.e. SCC1t2) and a way smaller soundfont that sounds ok.

A quick update/fix, I noticed that the Soundtrack instrument was tuned incorrectly, so Ive dealt with that and the synth tom. In other words, Ive also made a few other soundfonts, and I was wondering if anyone wanted to hear them or so.

So it's finally here, performing for you Miracle 1.2 is here now! This update is around 7.12MB, which is quite bigger that the last. Re-recorded Piano samples Changed Piano 2 (Bright Piano) and Piano 3 (El. Grand) to be brighter The brass instruments got a revamp, Trombone and Tubas in specific Added more Samples to French Horn so it sounded better on lower notes New Slap Bass 2 The Synth String sample has been replaced with a more crispy one Synth Brass 1 has higher brightness now Added a new Power Snare and Room Tom sample A sampler is up there in the Videos section now, along with a new download link. Cheers!

From Heretic I would probably pick MUS_E1M1, MUS_E1M6 or MUS_E1M9, Hexen I'd say Winnowing Hall and Strife I'd pick Tavern, Action and/or Tech. Raptor is interesting, I guess I could use the Menu and Level 4's themes. I'd just use MAP01 from Hacx. I should include Abuse and Demonstar as well, both from Bobby Prince.