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I need help....

Technical discussion which is not directly related to VGM files. Talk about Hardware and Software.

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I need help....

Post by Sharrif001 »

Hello there. I am trying to find a program that converts VGMs to MIDIs, but they must be extremely accurate, and are able to handle all systems. Second, the program must be in a GUI interface and not via command line- not all of us grew up with DOS back in the day. It also must be separate from an emulator.

The program should handle all sound chips.

If I can find one out there that works for me that is recent, and not filled with bugs, then it would be greatly appreciated.

If you can help me with this, I will be extremely grateful. Thank you for your time.
  • ctr Offline
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Post by ctr »

There is no such thing as an accurate VGM to MIDI converter. Because some information required for good MIDI conversion is not present in VGM files, and features necessary to accurately reproduce VGMs are not present in MIDI files. Simple as that. For example, tempo and measure timings will not be present, for FM chips patch data will be lost, and for PCM chips the notes will most likely will be in the wrong key.

If you want a new-ish program, MDPlayer is an option. I'll leave it to you to figure out how to enable MIDI logging though.

Finally, the "Ideas and WIP" forum is for VGM pack requests or works in progress.

Post by Sharrif001 »

I see. Guess I can't experiment with soundfonts. It is no wonder why everyone composes MIDIs instead of converting them, and 90 to 100% of the time, it is always a bunch of MIDIs for a famous game that everyone loves.

VB edit: Removed fullquote.
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  • ValleyBell Offline
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Post by ValleyBell »

The fact that logging VGMs causes some information (e.g. measure timing) to be lost is the reason why I write MIDI converters that work with the original sequence data.

Post by Sharrif001 »

ValleyBell wrote:The fact that logging VGMs causes some information (e.g. measure timing) to be lost is the reason why I write MIDI converters that work with the original sequence data.
Interesting. Can it be done? Do those converters require the use of the command line interface? Because I am not accustomed to using it since, not all of us worked with DOS back in the day.
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Post by ctr »

It takes 5 minutes to learn to use a command line interface and you don't have to "be working on DOS back in the day" to use it.

Also, depending on the game you want to extract the music from (you basically said all of them in your previous request), you might need to extract the data from the games. That will require more work (inside or outside a command line interface, it really depends).

Post by Sharrif001 »

ctr wrote:It takes 5 minutes to learn to use a command line interface and you don't have to "be working on DOS back in the day" to use it.

Also, depending on the game you want to extract the music from (you basically said all of them in your previous request), you might need to extract the data from the games. That will require more work (inside or outside a command line interface, it really depends).

Thanks for the link. I shall try out those commands.

I only want to try to convert the VGMS to MIDI because I have a soundfont player that I have been experimenting MIDIs on, particularly one that uses the Roland MT-32 instruments.

The games I want to try to convert to MIDI are the games from Micro Cabin, Compile, T&E SOFT, XtalSoft and Wolfteam.
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