hell yes this is going to be such a good battle

OOOOOOOOOO

*stumbles up from bed, pours 3 litres of coffee right into the spine*
Weellll heellrrouu therreee mai cuutteee little friends what do we have heeeerree!!!! UNCLE TURDATRON JUST GOT VERY INTERESTEDESTEDS.

https://youtu.be/ZSVXoFlhi1w?t=13

is this supposed to be.... black midi?????????

I don't get it, but I submitted a thing anyway!

remember that botbs MIDI format is MSGS only!!

is it fine using Aria Maestosa for that? Timidity plays it fine! :)

I'll wait for XG but this is cool nevertheless
@nitro - anything that creates a valid GM/GS MIDI AND plays as Intended on MS Windows' internal synth.

@nitrofurano it should be fine, as long as the file format is .mid, and the .mp3 render is made using MSGS (you'll probably have to download GM.DLS somewhere and render your midi using that, or ask someone to render it for you)
the program for making the midi itself does not matter as long as it exports a midi file

by the way, i assume SC-55 renders are illegal for botb usage but if anyone wants SC-55 renders of their songs, just let me know! (preferably via discord)

i assume it's to standardize renders (to ensure that one entry won't sound better than another solely because of how it was rendered)

and because GM.DLS is seen as "free" even though it technically isnt (GM.DLS is owned by Roland; it does come with windows, but windows itself isn't free as well (most of the time anyway, hehe))

though i'm personally okay with MSGS being the "proper" midi-rendering method, since it's the closest to "official way that midi should sound" there is, and it's what's easily acessible for most people anyway (certainly more accessible than a physical sound module, that's for sure)

as a voter though, i wouldn't be against sc-55 renders since they're "close enough" to GM.DLS (and as long as that's included in the description, in order to not confuse n00bs)

That's why we have a separate MT-32 category (and maybe Yamaha XG which I'm slightly lobbying for, in the future haha)

It's a conscious decision to prevent it from being allgear and assuring that people face the same limits of the same output synth (MIDI, being "just" a protocol can drive any compatible synth, so allowing anything to render it would be hardly different from allgear)

Are we allowed to use the extended MSGS patches such as Sine Wave 81 8 vs the plain Square Wave 81?

Btw keffie, Foobar 2000 is kinda awful at handling MIDI (says someone who uses FB2K as her main media player otherwise).
Foobar can only use a few built-in synths that sound bad with most of sequences OR send it to a VST of your choice, which is great and nice unless you want to route it to any port exposed by your operating system, which isn't possible. This also means no MSGS output effectively.

You might want to look into different players, few of good ones are listed on the MIDI page in BotB Lyceum.
Personally I'd recommend FSMP but things like MIDITrail, Winamp, TMIDI etc also will do.

FSMP has the advantage that it can automatically record without external software involved.

@nocturne yes, all patches including GS mode; have been done by people in the past, and nobody objected so no need to keep it strictly to standard 128 GM ones

does modern windows use extra patches by default?
when was this introduced?
i had no idea! :U

It's always been this way. The >GS< in "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth" isn't there just for decoration.
MSGS, being a heavily chopped down implementation of Roland's SC-55 inherits its GS mode and associated extended patches, except there's still no effects whatsoever - it's drier than Sahara during noon. You could use this mode in Windows XP (and possibly in 98 too, but I can only attest for XP), so it's by no means anything new.

EDIT: It's actually described in our Lyceum as well

I'm so excited you guys ghbgjvdstvasryevbtibr6i

MSGS got its polyphony hit hard after Windows XP. If we submit our render, is using Fruity LSD acceptable or do we still have to do it with the janky Windows 7 and beyond MSGS? A lot of my old midis don't sound the same anymore since I regularly used a lot of polyphony, but LSD emulates this so much better than the current Windows.

I prefer to be on LSD when playing back MIDI files

@bluenocturne
This had never been explicitly addressed in the BotB's Lyceum article, so it isn't technically disallowed (and it's what i actually suggested here as one of the methods to render directly from FL.

Ideally we would brainstorm on whether or not this should be allowed or not and add an appropriate notice in the format rules, but i'm not sure if most of people here care enough about MIDI/know enough about MSGS.

The thing with Windows' internal synthesis is that there's two ways to access the MSGS sound set in Windows

, either the regular one via the old MME midiOut API or a different one, introduced later and now technically deprecated but still working - through DirectX's DirectMusic. It seems that currently barely any software supports picking between those two and defaults to MME midiOut but old Winamp

and FL Studio (through Fruity LSD) can still make use of it.

DirectMusic seems to be rendering with its own synth engine, merely using the same gm.dls wave bank (by default, since this can be controlled and some games like Gothic and Gothic 2

actually made use of DM with custom banks loaded, to create dynamic soundtracks), which is why the usual polyphony limit is bypassed.

BTW I'm actually curious about the polyphony of the bare MSGS you mentioned - did it actually change over the years with the subsequent versions of Windows? Or maybe you just used to play it via the DirectMusic API before and never noticed/knew, which would explain why. I'm curious tbh.

i did feel that something was off when i started listening midis using windows 10, previously was windows xp... but i am not sure if it is the polyphony. unfortunately i do not have my older computer around to check it? if someone else could speak regarding it, since i have not payed much attention to polyphony at the time as well? (it was one of the things i take for granted haha)

I can check it inside a virtual machine, just link me a MIDI track that you think hits the polyphony cap on Windows 10.

Although i can only compare Windows 8.1 and XP because i normally run 8.1 as my main OS

I remember the first midi I ever did for this site (Dance of the Reindeer) had a few problems with the polyphony limit, and ever since then I've used FL Studio to render to mp3 which ignores the poly limit.

Personally I feel that the limit is stupid and pointless and I don't understand why it's there. It feels really arbitrary. I think ideally midis should be designed to minimize the impact of the limit for those who do download and play the .mid file (eg, careful choice of channel numbers/instrument types, and removing less important notes where necessary), but imo it's totally fine to also use a mp3 rendering method that removes the limit entirely.

There might have been a legitimate reason to keep the maximum polyphony low at the time of MSGS' introduction in Windows 98 - to keep the CPU load reasonably low even in less powerful machines of the time - just my guess, though i'm of opinion that it should be user-configurable. But then again, some people here claim it used to be higher and was only crippled later, which i'm not sure about.

It still doesn't make much sense considering the DirectMusic API and synth which lift the limits came shortly after the regular MSGS though.

PS. Still can't wait for Yamaha XG + S-YXG50 to be approved as official BotB format :3

Oh I definitely remember the polyphony limit not being a thing when I started out writing midis. I don't remember exactly what version of Windows introduced it - maybe it was a 64 bit thing? Or a Windows 7 thing?

gonna click-the-hear-all-button-for-themidi batel this is gonna be fun.

hay does anyone remember that math-pattern/fractal midi program that was the best. for windows. like, from around 1997 or something

This article

lists some of the fractal music generators. You might be looking for FractMus

Does anyone know if there is an easy way to add the SysEx midi info for GM2 (GS reset) to access the extended sound set? I forgot that FL Studio does not do this so I was wondering if there is a free program that allows us to add this information to a finalized midi.

domino is really good at sysex, gs, cc, etc out of the box but is kind of hard to use. but its a great midi editor and quickly becoming my favorite

You can also use Reaper, it has a full event editor, or a simple tool like MIDIPLEX. (hosted on GitHub)

Re-submitted one more time. This time I changed all the instruments and mapped most of them to precussion, with mpt.

Oh yeah and i also made the mp3 version by recording my soundcard with audacity :^)

ehehe yay!!!

Honestly ashamed I had no material for my own idea... Will have to participate in A Capella tho

Average Score: 23.206

Average: 23.2. Me: 22.9. Woohoo, I'm almost average!

I have disappointed my friends, family and my cactus for not doing anything for this compo, I did start on abour 3 entries, but none of them held up for what I was actually trying to do, so in the end I just said "fuck it" and started waiting for Winrar Chyps instead ;)

Strobe sighting Paparazzi!

u ded yet? if not, head on down to teh brancump for DEEF