Music hacking help Skype chat

[Agro]

Hello! So I recently began to wonder if anyone would benefit from a cozy little group chat to which they can specifically ask for help with music hacking. It seems to be an area that people are a little scared of. Just wanted to get some expressions of interest. I was also wondering if anyone would perhaps benefit from me recording how I put different types of songs together.

The cost of the Skype chat would only be that I'd ask you to write a tutorial on whatever it is you just learned how to do so that anyone else with the same question can simply read what you've learned. Call it self-reflective learning.

[EldinnerPlate]

It's like Michael Jordan offering to teach you how to ball.

I would definitely be interested but I haven't even gotten around to reading Blazer's music hacking tutorial so I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to ask any good questions. Once I get a basic grasp though I'd definitely take you up on your offer. As for the video, it sure wouldn't hurt to have one to follow along with for anyone that looks into inserting custom music.

[Agro]

Without being too blunt about it Blazer's tutorial is kind of rubbish so I wouldn't even bother

[Wayward Winds]

I think the problem is more "It's old". Sappy is much faster and generally works better (once you get past its quirks, although even it can't correctly insert "Release of the Far West Ocean" for me - at least it gets further with that than manual insertion), but I don't think it was around when the Ultimate Tutorial's music section was written.

I haven't got Skype, so I'm out of this by default. I'm okay with cutting midi's down to size and inserting them anyway.

Edited April 18, 2015 by Wayward Winds

[Agro]

It was definitely around - it's been around since 2006 and people have been using it to insert music since 2008. Either Blazer did some very shallow research or Sappy didn't work for him and he decided that rather than fix the problem he'd avoid it altogether.

although even it can't correctly insert "Release of the Far West Ocean" for me

I'm curious to know what the problem is. Care to elaborate?

[Kobazco]

I once inserted music via sappy. IT TOOK FOREVER TO FIND OUT. The main problem for me is finding songs in MIDI form and how to get them to play properly after being inserted :D

Also as for writing a tutorial after learning i would probably just copy paste everything you say in skype into a document and then post it xD

Edited April 19, 2015 by Kobazco

[Wayward Winds]

I'm curious to know what the problem is. Care to elaborate?

...Well, it inserts and you do get something that sounds pretty good (if a little unbalanced on the volume front) for the first bit. And then it starts to destabilise (best word to describe it) around the 30 second mark and goes outright berserk by the time you hit the 50 second mark. It's hard to describe; if you want to hear what I mean, here's a patch.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/vnhwa2kvchb6jps/Music_Patch.zip

(I'm not asking for anyone to fix it (because I've got backup music in mind now), but I am curious if anyone knows just what's going wrong. It only happens with this particular song!)

I once inserted music via sappy. IT TOOK FOREVER TO FIND OUT. The main problem for me is finding songs in MIDI form and how to get them to play properly after being inserted :D

Also as for writing a tutorial after learning i would probably just copy paste everything you say in skype into a document and then post it xD

It took me a while to get the thing working as well. Eventually I figured out that somewhere down the line, the computer had learnt to associate .S files with .txt, and that single problem was grinding Sappy to a halt. Then there's getting drum tracks working properly (thanks again for that hint a while back Agro!), and the requirement that you need Midi type 0's to get looping to work. But once you've got the hang of it you can effortlessly insert a song in under three minutes. Much better than hex fiddling!

You can find midis all over the place when you start trying to track down that one elusive song.

[spoiler=Possible midi sources]

Good sources: VGMusic (remember to check the "new files" section there!), KHinsider, the Midi Shrine, Musescore (that one's a bit iffy on user rights though, and most will be one instrument only (usually piano)), etc. Sometimes you can find a whole batch from a Japanese site just by typing e.g. FF11 Midis (That gives you http://www.geocities.jp/kurogeki/page015.html). Then there's the time I found the entire soundtracks of Touhou's 6 to 8 by following a link from Youtube. Google is your friend.

Then you can try ripping midis from ROMS. The NDS Sound Extractor available on Blazer's site (http://www.feshrine.net/hacking/musiceditors.php) is a bit hit and miss; sometimes it produces brilliant midis that can easily be cut down enough to fit into FE7 without sacrificing any of their main component parts (Endless Frontier is an example), but other times you get midis that sound atrocious; instruments all over the place, notes missing etc., generally bearing only a tangential resemblance to the original song (And unfortunately Fire Emblem's 11 and 12 are in this category, so no sneakily grabbing Liberation or Footsteps of Fate with minimal effort!). And sometimes you'll find a ROM that the NDS extractor just won't work with; e.g. the Luminous Arc games (Shame, the second game had a few nice songs).

...And then there's Sappy itself. Throw a GBA ROM in, search through the songs until you find the one you like, then click "Tasks > Record to Midi". Again, you aren't guaranteed to get something that sounds just like it did in the game, but it seems to be more reliable than the NDS extractor in this regard. Sappy doesn't work for the Super Robot Wars games, but most others do work - and quite a few SRW tracks can be extracted from Endless Frontier with the NDS extractor!

The trick to finding midis is simply to persist. As for editing them to fit and sound all right, that requires a little more effort. The most basic tricks are to merge tracks that sound similar to each other/two parts of the same whole, and to delete tracks that are mostly lost under the rest. Careful with your trimming though, it's easy to go to far and cut out/drastically change the sound of an important part of the song, and if that happens you have to reload the original midi and start again!

Edited April 19, 2015 by Wayward Winds

[Agro]

Wayward Winds, that's happening because your MIDI has "Modulation" commands in them. Modulation is essentially a type of vibrato. It pitch bends your notes up and down (modulates) according to the given value and the loop timing of the sample. Ordinarily the parameter attached to modulation actually changes the frequency at which the note "pulses" and not the pitch; however, for whatever reason the creators of the Sappy engine decided that the frequency would be decided by the sample size and that the parameter would change the pitch instead. It's a MIDI command, so it can be fixed and erased with Anvil. If you had access to a program like Sonar I'd tell you to use a Cakewalk Assembly Language script to scale them down but since you don't, you'll have to settle with erasing them. Alternatively you could scale them down in your .s file by hand (not recommended!!!!) if you really felt like giving yourself an hour's work. You'll see them come up as .byte MOD , [parameter between 0-127] in the text files.

Edited April 20, 2015 by Agro

[Wayward Winds]

Wayward Winds, that's happening because your MIDI has "Modulation" commands in them. Modulation is essentially a type of vibrato. It pitch bends your notes up and down (modulates) according to the given value and the loop timing of the sample. Ordinarily the parameter attached to modulation actually changes the frequency at which the note "pulses" and not the pitch; however, for whatever reason the creators of the Sappy engine decided that the frequency would be decided by the sample size and that the parameter would change the pitch instead. It's a MIDI command, so it can be fixed and erased with Anvil. If you had access to a program like Sonar I'd tell you to use a Cakewalk Assembly Language script to scale them down but since you don't, you'll have to settle with erasing them. Alternatively you could scale them down in your .s file by hand (not recommended!!!!) if you really felt like giving yourself an hour's work. You'll see them come up as .byte MOD , [parameter between 0-127] in the text files.

Hmm, that's interesting. I'll have a go at fixing it so I know what to do if the problem shows up again, but like I said, I'm probably not going to use that particular song anyway. Sure it's got an epic opening perfect for boss theme, but there's no way to loop it without being particularly jarring about it. I've found other good songs since then.

Thanks for the directions!