Good MIDI soundfont/tracker?

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octagon
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Good MIDI soundfont/tracker?

Post by octagon »

I've been composing some VGM-ish music lately. However, I'm using Anvil Studio, and even if I run it through the best soundfont I have, MIDI music always has a ...crummy sound quality, and MIDIs aren't something I'd listen to even in case of music that would be actually good otherwise.
It's hardly complete because I suck at polyphony, and a single audio track is both too bland for a full tune and lacks variability, and like everything else, I tend to work on about five pieces at the same time.

I'd like to know if there's a simple way to make MIDI-composed songs sound good (as in "commercial game soundtrack quality"). PS games, like FF7, FFT or Suikoden apparently use something midi-ish as well, but their music's audio quality doesn't suck.
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woodmouse
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Re: Good MIDI soundfont/tracker?

Post by woodmouse »

Not as far as I know... but I hate MIDI and soundfonts, so I don't know anything about them, other than they suck. :P My advice would be to use VSTis, but I'm not trying to be an idiot and a basspole.

PS: I don't know about now, but in around 2008 (when I used Anvil), it used to install some virus(es) on the computer, and sucked otherwise too, since saving .mp3 files was impossible, etc. and if I tried to uninstall it, got a message like "to uninstall Anvil Studio, you have to uninstall your firewall and anti-virus. This is because [insert obviously illogical excuses here]". Then, when doing a virus scan: BAM!!! Anvil.exe (if that's what it was called) contains a virus. After deleting it from there, the whole computer worked a lot faster. And yes, it was downloaded from the official website, not some torrent.
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Re: Good MIDI soundfont/tracker?

Post by bgbirdsey »

If you are planning on doing synthesized music, there is nothing that you can do that can't be represented in MIDI, so the problem is not MIDI's fault, it is the fault of bad "musicians".

There are only two paradigms for synthesizing music: simulation and sampling. Both have limitations. If you want to get away from samples, try something like CSound. It uses simulation rather than samples, but it is hella hard to get anything out of it, and there is no simple way to convert something into the CSound song files, which means you will have to code it in MIDI and convert or type everything in by hand.
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