Hi! After trying to make several Midi files, with different instruments, i finally admitted that making a good smps is... very difficult. I'm using Sekaiju for the midis, and so i convert them with mid2smps, and i use the SMPSOptimizer after it. After multiple trials, my songs are never live up to the original Sonic 1's smps songs, or like Megamix or something like... Sometimes i wondered if this is because some channels used a high volume (110, 127...) Or if i have chosen a wrong instrument. For example, the Saw Wave, the Square Wave, Overdrive Guitar, Timpanis instruments sounds good before converting... After converting many songs from smps to midi (with smps2mid) to look at the instruments used in Labyrinth Zone, Green Hill Zone, even customs smps from here, i notice that the "Piano 3" is frequently used in the songs, and when i'm using it in my midis, the smps does not sounds as good as the original songs, but like a old 8 bit bad song. So there is some questions: _What are the goods instruments to use in Sonic 1? _There is something special to do with the channels or the track itself? When i listen to Megamix songs, i want to say: why not me? EDIT: Sorry, i suck in english.
When I make 16-bit covers of songs, I try to not limit myself to the instruments used in one specific game. FM instruments are usually made for the specific song it was created for, meaning that you might have to modify them a bit to fit into another song. Just using the basic FM patches given to you in mid2smps like a "soundfont" isn't really going to cut it. I recommend downloading a YM2612 VST (in my opinion, Genny VST) and make a mock YM2612 cover of it first with your own FM instruments. This doesn't need to be made from scratch, it can be modified or ripped straight from other Genesis games (although you probably need some knowledge about Genesis OSTs to find the specific FM patch you want). Genny has some decent presets you can mess around with though. Actually now that I mention it, here is a pack with over 33,000 .tfi patches for you to use. Once you find the FM patches you love, you should export these instruments into a folder. You can export instruments in Genny by pressing the import tab shown below, and click on "Export Instrument". I recommend saving it as a .vgi file. Spoiler After that is done, you should open up mid2smps and open the instruments editor. In the instruments editor you should click on the "Import Instrument from File" button and then pick the .vgi extension in this box below: Spoiler Once that is done, this box will have your directory open, which is where you'll need to find the folder holding your .vgi patches. Spoiler Once you find your folder holding your .vgi patches, the box to the right will have them listed. Click on one of them, and that one will start appearing in the box below where they are listed. Click Ok, and repeat that process until you have all instruments transferred into this box located in the furthest left on the program. Once that is done you should start connecting each FM patch to the MIDI instruments used in the MIDI file. Keep doing it until you have all FM patches connected. Once that is done, I recommend normalizing your FM patches by clicking on Operator 1's Total Level box, and pressing Control + N together. Make sure you have an FM instrument highlighted. Once you normalized all of your FM patches, I recommend saving this bank. You can do so by pressing the button that states "save this bank". Now, everything else besides the FM can stay the same really. I also recommend setting up the MID2SMPS MIDI Driver to load this specific FM bank to help edit the volumes of each instrument in your track. Once that is done, you should make your track loop. I recommend using Anvil Studio for this part. Actually, here is a tutorial on how to do so in Anvil Studio from jubbalub.
Songs used in Genesis games use coordination flags that Mid2SMPS isn't able work with. You can read about them here. The reason why Sonic Megamix's songs sound so good is because they are either ported from other Genesis games or composed without the use of programs.
Oh the coordination flags, i use them. And for compose a song without programs, this is the Hex edit?
That's wrong, actually. mid2smps supports all important effect flags. (E1 for pitch bends/detune, E7 for pitch slides/pitch bend, E8 for staccato effects, F0 for modulation) However, you need a MIDI program that lets you place arbitrary MIDI control changes to be able to use those features.
Wow, this is wrong on so many levels. When Megamix still used SMPS songs instead of mp3 audio, most of those songs sounded good because they were converted by people who knew what they were doing. Tweaker was involved in most of the conversions, if not all; he usually prepared the MIDI files by arranging them to the Genesis capabilities, and other people including Puto and myself then performed the conversion process itself (with, guess what, programs such as xm3smps (me) and xm4smps (Puto)). At that point, Tweaker usually added some final touches to the converted songs, but it most cases it wasn't anything major. Other songs in Megamix have been ported by other games, yes, and some other songs have been handmade by Cinossu, but saying that the songs in Megamix sounded good because they were "composed without the use of programs" is highly offensive to someone who worked on a good share of those songs. While the xm to smps series weren't perfect at all, the two Piano Trophies in my hand beg to differ with your statement. Which is why the answer to the question in the OP isn't easily defined. There are many ways to make a good SMPS song. Then again, there is a bottom line to that question: to make a good SMPS song, you have to be good at making SMPS songs. Some tools might give you an advantage compared to other ones, and you can still write music by hand like Cinossu or Varion, you can be like me and edit SMPS files in ms-dos editor, you can do whatever you want, if you know what you're doing. That all said, I easily admit that the music quality improved so much these days, and I've long accepted my current inferiority (the results from the first 20 rounds of the SMPS competition say hi). I might have been the one who reinvented music hacking after Saxman's initial work, but Valleybell re-reinvented music hacking with all his useful tools. That, along with contributions from Flamewing, Clownacy, and possibly other people, opened the flood gates to a new generation of people skilled with SMPS. To cite Terminator, I'm old, not obsolete.
At first I was tempted not to answer, since you quoted my entire post for no reason at all. But apparently that's ok now (even though I strongly disagree with that), so I'll answer. Near the end of its development cycle, Sonic Megamix was moved to the Sega CD, meaning that it could use CDDA audio (I said mp3 because some songs were also made available in that format for casual download, though yes, to be technically correct I should have said CDDA in my previous post). If you used 5 seconds of your time to type "Sonic Megamix" on Google (like I just did) you would have ended up here. tl;dr I still hate people who quote an entire post for no reason and people who don't bother to search for things
Please, if you've got a good reason for that, post it in the thread. I wasn't exactly overjoyed to see those reports being ignored, either.
You should learn how SMPS music works. I cant really compose for shit, but I can port SMPS from a lot of games simply by understanding the format and manipulating it for my liking. This should also help you compose, as you better understand the limits and the strong points, you can make the most out of what you have or dont have.
