hey everyone
i was playing lemmings yesterday, the original for PC... and i realized how awesome it would be to listen to this from a cd, while driving my car....
the music for lemmings is in midi format.
i need it to be .wav to burn on a cd
winamp doesnt seem to be able to do that, unless theres a plug-in i dont know about
anyone have any suggestions?
also, if you know where the original lemmings music is, in wav format, on the net, that would be just as good....
THANKS!

Try WinGroove.


Edit: screwed up the link, sorry. should be fixed now.

i did. i tried a lot of utilities. they either would only do a ten second bit, only do a 30 second bit, or couldnt find some file, and didnt work at all. wingroove only does 30 seconds until you register, and pay... so unless someone knows of a hack for it....

It may not be the fastest way but should work without any utilities. Just connect the out of your sound card with the line-in and record the wave with you favourite wave editor. There will be some sound quality loss but it should be acceptable. Not the most conveniant way though.

You're kinda lucky - You haven't heard Amiga version

From PP's FAQ:

rtfm://www.blorp.com/~peter/midihelp/midi2wav.htm

Hmm i wonder if thats the dos version? i don't remember seeing midis but later i got a single midi file that seems to contain all the songs glued together, which doesn't seem to sound right with a GM/GS device unless you tweak the instruments for the whole song.

If i remember correctly, Lemmings (PC/DOS) used the FM synth a bit more properly than a cheapo midi device, something for which those fm chips weren't made for. (FM synthesis != Cheap midi!!!)

Lemmings Amiga seems to use a mod style format. I have the opening and it is indeed a normal mod file . The PC versions seems to have more songs tho... I never tried the windows re-released versions, so i wonder.

I'm doing the exact same thing with the music from Doom & Doom II. It's probably all the hours I spent being haunted as a kid by those tunes, but I really love em!

I can't even get them into midi's properly. The Doom music extracts to .mus files, which you convert to .mid files, but the tempo is altered slightly, as are the instruments. Plus the old Yamaha card that plays them "properly" to me doesn't support midi anymore for some reason.

I've just stuck a cable from the old card into my amp, then from my amp to my new card's line-in. Using 2 leads via the amp will add more noise to the output, but it's the only way I can get it to sound stable (not jumping from stereo to right speaker only) and the only way to keep the bass (which just er, dissapears from time to time otherwise!)

It's inconvenient, but only adds about -80dB of noise somehow, and it's the only way I've found!

Many old DOS games (not sure about Doom, but I think so) used Amiga-style trackers (.MOD files), which you can usually tell apart from MIDI files (they sound/sounded much better, especially on an old FM-synthesis soundcard). If you can get the music into .MOD format, there are plenty of plugins to play these music files back, record to .wave, whatever you want.

I still have a nice size collection of .MODs somewhere on my hard drive, which I listen to every once in awhile... among all the repetitive junk, there are some real creative gems.

Memories.... light the corner of my mindddd...

http://pjeantaud.free.fr/mod4win/english.html

I think you may find this page useful: http://doomworld.com/classicdoom/info/music.php?wad=doom.wad

I will try doing what you just described to record from my midi card. I tried directly connecting to the ac97 thing my current mobo has, but im unable to lower the line in recording volume enough (without muting it) to prevent clipping...

Just for the record. The music for Doom / Doom 2 was intended to play using a Roland Sound Canvas, and i happen to own one of these.

I still remember Yamaha's XG GS emu, good, but not the same...

There used to be 2 comercial Soft midi synths by the name of "Virtual Sound Canvas", i think these could be used (or at least with total recorder) for a good conversion.

I've had great experiences converting MIDI files to WAV using a program called Audio Compositor. It's incredibly precise; much more precise than hardware. You can tell it just how precise you want it, to the point that it can take a fast computer ten minutes to render a 20-second MIDI clip.

The advantages are that you can then use a huge 140MB soundfont, and you can apply high-quality, instrument-independent effects. I used this program to convert my "The 7th Guest" midis, and the results were phenomenal.

By the way, if anyone remembers how awesome the music was for T7G, or is just a fan of The Fat Man's music in general, I'd be happy to send him or her (if we even have any "her"'s on this board at all...) some MP3's of the results, which unfortunately are encoded with some r3mix commandline variant.

Audio Compositor looks very intriguing... I couldn't figure out if any 'soundfonts' come with the program, or if you have to find them elsewhere. If not, are there any free ones you recommend?

I've got a soundfont on my hard drive called "80mg_Melting_Pot2.zip", and I think I ended up deleting the 140MB one, but the one that sounded best for T7G was a 64MB one with a name something like "fluke" or "flush" or something like that (obviously, I misplaced that one too ).

With the collapse of the free internet (free as in beer), it's harder to find big soundfonts hosted for free, but I did stumble on this site, which hosts some 80MB and 100MB soundfonts. Of course, bigger doesn't always mean better, so the best soundfont on that site might end up being the 32MB one, for all I know.

If you're looking for a free solution (not crippled shareware) and a reasonably good quality try timidity++. It's not audio compositor but it does its work.
Just remember you have to download the EAW Patches and install them.

Armetis, if you manage to record the songs off your Roland card I'd be interested to hear how the music was meant to sound I grew up with it on an SB16, but then I got a Yamaha 32, and it just sounds right on that! With one exception sadly, one of my favourite tunes, E2M2 is messed up, the eerie whistle instrument peaks at -35dB, so it's completely inauidable behind the big assed bassline

I'll try downloading all the midi files (thanks for the link!!) and a copy of Audio Compositor & timidity++ if it won't do what I want as a demo.... then slap them on my old computer and see if it takes a week to render a 5 minute track!

Hmmm..... well I can't get timidity++ to even work... and I can't figure out how to get AC using the soundcards actual sound bank? It's just turning every song into a bunch of bass notes it the pattern of the drumbeats! Plus it only renders 30 seconds unless someone really kind would give me a serial no. for it ?

I don't know what soundcard you are using, but here is a suggestion.

1) Click on start
2) Click on run
3) Type sndvol32.exe [enter]
4) Click on options
5) Click on properties
6) Select "Adjust sound volume for... Recording"
7) Look on the list of sources below, and check them all
8) Click OK
9) Now select one named "MIDI" or "Mixed Output" or "What your hear" or something like this. This will cause any audio recording software to make your computers output the sound input.
10) If you have no better option, click start and run again, and type sndrec32.exe [enter]
11) Click on files, and properties, click on "convert now" and select "CD Quality" and convert.
12) Click on the record button, now quickly loud up your midi-file in windows media player, and now your midi-file should be recorded as WAV while playing.

As far as I know, SoundRecorder has a time limitation causing it to stop after a minute - maybe more or maybe less. So for optimal results I would suggest you use this program to record with : http://download.com.com/3000-2170-10107438.html?tag=lst-0-1

Regards
MadiZone

Thanks madi!

There are 2 problems I've got with that though, my old soundcard can't record itself.. if I tell it to record from midi, then once a midi file is playing, I'm not allowed to record as the soundcard is already in use... or if I start recording I can't then start a midi file, becuase the card is already in use!!

Plus I need split the midi into seperate tracks and fix the volume of just one of them I think

Ah yes, at the time, one of the reviews about the Yamaha XG said something about too much bass (i suppose it was to appeal all those pc speaker users . Ok i encoded the song, it should be here: http://liquid2k.com/artemis3/d_e2m2.mpc (3.66MB)

For reference, the original midi file: http://liquid2k.com/artemis3/d_e2m2.mid (24.8KB)

Remember that these files were composed for the Roland Sound Canvas, so it should not sound any "worse" or "better", but have fun tweaking your soft synths

I won't leave that file there forever.... If you have an ftp server or something where i could send you more files then tell me and i'll see what i can do.