Replacing Mono Samples with Stereo Versions

• Im 6 0

  Message de Immorpher le …
  New Polyphone user here! I had experience a long time ago making soundfonts. Now I am back at it again upgrading an old soundfont. I see that replacing mono samples is as simple as dragging and dropping but how would I replace a mono sample with a stereo one?
• 12 0

  Message de Filipe Barros Rodrigues le … 1
  Hello!
  
  When you import a stereo wav sample, Polyphone divides it into two mono samples and name them accordingly to their channel, e.g. you have a stereo sample named "snare1.wav", after you import it, you'll see a "snare1(L)" and a "snare1(R)" or something like that in midst your samples. To use them, you just bind them to an instrument pretending they're ordinary mono samples and set their balance (or pan, I don't recall which Polyphone uses) according to their ear position, with values -50 to play full left and 50 to play full right.
  
  But be advised that when you use stereo samples for instruments and put them in a MIDI track, for some odd reason you can't pan their sound, making it impossible to use certain stereo effects in a MIDI song with them. I don't know why, but the only instruments you can pan and do such effects is mono ones.
• Im 6 0

  Message de Immorpher le …
  Oh interesting! I didn't know making them stereo would prevent them from panning. I will have to re-think which ones I would like to make stereo.
  
  But your directions on adding stereo samples makes sense, I will try that ASAP.
• Message de Immorpher le … 1
  Indeed your tips did the trick in getting sounds stereo. I think I have decided which I want stereo and which I don't. I also verified indeed that stereo sounds ignore midi event panning.
  
  As a bonus I came across this 2018 post trying to come to grips with panning of stereo sounds: https://lists.defectivebydesign.org/archive/html/fluid-dev/2018-01/msg00006.html
• 12 0

  Message de Filipe Barros Rodrigues le …
  Dude, you actually helped me with something I was looking for an answer for a while. I was just wondering where the problem with the stereo sample panning was, and the description of your link op's problem matches exactly with my experience, now I know it must be something related to the MIDI standard itself, more than just a soundfont configuration or a more complicated midi driver setting. Thank you for the heads up!
• Im 6 0

  Message de Immorpher le …
  So I have made some interesting progress! My primary reason for replacing mono sounds with stereo ones, was to mod ports of an old game called Doom 64. Either the composer of the soundtrack, Aubrey Hodges, or the person who did the first PC port, Samuel Villareal, did the music compositions in an interesting way.
  
  Instead of using midi to do panning, the instruments in the sound font definitions were panned. Since the game originally was on the N64, it could have been a quirk of the N64's sound system. Anyway since it was only instruments that was panned, I could attenuate the volume in the left and right sample definitions (I used the rule of constant power). Which allowed me to have stereo samples, yet retain how panning worked in the original game.
  
  Here's my rendering of the soundtrack with my edited soundfont: https://youtu.be/L3Z7FEwknBQ
  And the full version of my mod: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/114534/
  
  Thank you for your help! And also thanks to Polyphone for making the process of editing SF2 files easy!
  
  Now I just need to figure out how to save DLS files (as one of the Doom 64 port uses that for music).
• 12 0

  Message de Filipe Barros Rodrigues le … 1
  And it just keeps getting more and more interesting... I'm hobbying in a very similar way you're working, I'm extracting old videogames soundtracks directly from their ROMs and converting them to midi, just to do a little uplifting on their quality! I'm playing around with Genesis, SNES, and I'm working on N64 soundtracks too, so if you want my help to have the original N64 soundtrack of Doom, I'm happy to help! The extracted midis have everything in their place, all necessary CC messages, pitch bends, note ons and their durations, but their instruments are "scrambled", that is, you'll have to define them individually. But for every game I tried, inside their midis they have assigned only one instrument per channel, which greatly helps you when you have to manually assign the instruments.
  
  As for your observation on N64 music handling, you would be surprised. In my experience, these classic consoles can actually completely handle the basic midi mechanisms, especially on N64. At least in Genesis and SNES, their only limitation on this matter is that they can't handle polyphony on a single channel, and they can handle only 8 channels, but N64 operates at full MIDI standard. If you get a piece of a midi extracted from a ROM, you'll see what I'm saying!
  
  Looking forward to the result of your works
• Im 6 0

  Message de Immorpher le …
  Fortunately I was able to ride on the work of others (Kaiser of Doom 64 EX / Nightdive studios) who were able to extract and assign the midis of the Doom 64 soundtrack. The composer of that soundtrack, Aubrey Hodges, has somewhat become a legend in the community for his foreboding style. But a lot of people don't realize he also did the Quake 64 soundtrack, which has a very similar style.
  
  The doom 64 soundfont only takes up like 50 preset slots. So my pipe dream would be to combine the Quake 64 presets into a Doom 64 soundfont. This will let the Doom 64 ports of GEC Master Edition and Doom 64 Retribution support Quake 64 music, but also I could make combinations of the instruments to make more midis as well.
  
  Any help or directions on getting the Quake 64 midis/soundfont extracted would be greatly appreciated! Plus I help out with music in the Quake community sometimes and they would love to have more music to work with.
• Message de Immorpher le …
  My buddy was able to figure out how to rip the music into a soundfont from Quake 64! He doesn't know how to do Quake 2 N64 yet since its a different sound system. But I found this which may help: https://github.com/jombo23/N64-Tools

Connectez-vous ou inscrivez-vous pour participer à la discussion.