Skip to content

vgm2mid tempo issue

Technical discussion about the VGM format, and all the software you need to handle VGM files.

Moderator: Staff

  • Carrot Offline
  • Posts: 2
  • Joined: 2015-09-18, 11:02:31

vgm2mid tempo issue

Post by Carrot »

Dear community,

first of all: thanks for having such a great website. =)

I'm really new to all of this. I'm a huge fan of the old genesis soundtracks and so far I've been able to install winamp and the chipamp plugin in order to play all the ost which works great.

I'm also a musician and I'd like to convert all those files to midi so I can import them in my DAW (i.e. Reaper). The tool I use for this is v2m05src by Paul Jensen. Unfortunately his email-address is no longer working so I have no idea how to get in touch with him. My problem: Converting a vgm file into a midi file works great but when I import the midi file into my DAW i notice that the bpm info is missing - my DAW does not recognise the bpm of the song. Is there anyway to include the bpm of a song within the midi file?
That would it make so much easier to cover those old soundtracks - one example I did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoxFwZklxnk

I hope my comment makes any sense to you - unfortunately I have no knowledge about technical aspects of the issue.

Thank you very much for your reply.
Carrot

(I also posted this here (http://project2612.org/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3047) as I don't know which forum is actually very active etc. + I also opened a thread about this issue on the REAPER forum as I thought Reaper might have a way to fix it (it's in German though): http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=107717)

Thanks a lot for any kind of feedback. =)

EDIT: Just in case it matter which OSTs I'd like to work with: Dune 2, Shining Force I+II, Light Crusader, Shinobi 3, Story of Thor, Ecco I+II
  • User avatar
  • ValleyBell Offline
  • Posts: 4768
  • Joined: 2011-12-01, 20:20:07
  • Location: Germany

Post by ValleyBell »

The main problem is, that VGMs contain no information about the tempo. VGMs run with a constant rate of 44100 ticks per second and that's all information about timing they have.

You might have some luck with this version of vgm2mid, which lets you specify the BPM setting of the exported MIDI file.
This needs some guessing and you need to play with the BPM value a bit to get it right, but the results can be decent. (I almost always had a small drift though.)
And of course tempo changes in the logged song will screw everything up.

EDIT: Alternatively you might be able to use higher-level conversion tools for some of the games.
For Light Crusader and Shinobi 3, using smps2mid should work. (It's SMPS 68k and you'll need to specify the pointer table manually.)
For Dune, gems2mid might work. (You'll need to extract the sequence data using GemsScan first.)
  • Carrot Offline
  • Posts: 2
  • Joined: 2015-09-18, 11:02:31

Post by Carrot »

Thanks a lot! I'll have a look at your suggestions. =)

Post by vampirefrog »

also have a look at http://vgmusic.com/ they have MIDI files all ready to go
  • Tom Offline
  • Ragequit Member
    Ragequit Member
  • Posts: 496
  • Joined: 2011-11-30, 17:26:44
  • Location: Italy
  • Contact:

Post by Tom »

Well, a century and a half ago I made this horrible thing.

The old link is dead because lol Digilander, and the old screenshots are dead because lol Imageshack, but here is a reupload of the main executable. I linked to the original topic because I cba to rewrite the full explanation.

Please note that when I say "horrible thing" I literally mean it. It detects the correct BPM like once in 9000 files, not to mention that it's full of bugs. I never made it better because the concept behind it is stupid, but how do you know, maybe your files will be the lucky ones.
Also known as nineko.
Post Reply