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Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sat May 30, 2015 6:29 pm
by KaleidonKep99
I talked about MIDIs and soundfonts in my first post here, and I'll talk about them here too!

Is the ReactOS team thinking about installing a default MIDI synth, like Windows?
Because I have a GM soundfont that I wanted to give to the team, to make it the default sound bank for ReactOS.
This would be a nice feature to add, and to make ReactOS like Windows.

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 8:21 am
by erkinalp
Is it MIDI 1 or MIDI2?

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 10:19 am
by EmuandCo
What license is it on and how did you make it?
Of course we have to add MIDI somewhere in the future, and GM Wavetable will be of use later.

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 10:24 am
by erkinalp
Beware that a complete General MIDI 2 sound font occupies approximately 150 MiB. It is larger than our current CD images. Can you make sound font an optional download so that we would still be able to burn our ISOs into a 224MiB Mini CDs?

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 11:06 am
by EmuandCo
We dont talk about brilliant Fonts which include UBER CD quality and are about 300 MB big. Windows has a general Wavetable included. Waaay smaller

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 2:26 pm
by erkinalp
Default wave table on Windows has a worse sound quality than hardware MIDI and it covers General MIDI 1 and a part of General Sound. General MIDI 2, on the other hand, covers way more instruments than General Sound and sound cards have support for it.

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 3:38 pm
by KaleidonKep99
EmuandCo wrote:What license is it on and how did you make it?
Of course we have to add MIDI somewhere in the future, and GM Wavetable will be of use later.
Creative Commons, I made it by myself.
It's called Codename Merkin.

I've searched for samples, and some guys helped me creating this soundfont, I used Polyphone.

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 3:41 pm
by KaleidonKep99
erkinalp wrote:Is it MIDI 1 or MIDI2?
GM1 is fully supported, I'm still working for full support with GM2, but still better than the default "PC Speaker".

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 8:31 pm
by dsp8195
Although I use VSTi version of Yamaha SXG-50 (MU50) in most cases, I'd like to test this soundfont. I don't see the download link at your homepage, though. :|

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Sun May 31, 2015 9:51 pm
by KaleidonKep99
dsp8195 wrote:Although I use VSTi version of Yamaha SXG-50 (MU50) in most cases, I'd like to test this soundfont. I don't see the download link at your homepage, though. :|
I removed it for technical reasons, since it was bugged.
I'm going to add it back now.

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2015 9:12 am
by EmuandCo
One thing for sure, we NEED MIDI sooner or later. NTVDM would love it.

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2015 11:18 am
by KaleidonKep99
Here is the link to the download: https://mega.co.nz/#!FNVCHCDQ!scNpA-WyY ... _HBroqgJ3k

I tried to make it the smallest possible, now it's 44 MB, but now the quality isn't good as the original one. :T

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2015 3:29 pm
by Black_Fox
Maybe the soundbank could be distributed separated from the ISO for the near future - just like wine-gecko is right now. Then the testers could still download hundreds of revisions without blowing their HDDs away, while having it available on their testing ISOs.

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2015 6:58 pm
by dsp8195
Speaking about space minimization, several years ago I've proposed ROS team to adopt _kb's (Farbrausch) v2 procedural synth as default virtual MIDI device. The code license was unclear back then, but now it's available in both Assembly and C++ versions under Public Domain:

https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/tree/master/v2

Upsides:

* The size of compiled synth core is around ~32 Kb
* Supports tons of effects, just listen this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX75cYEMukQ
* Includes formant voice synth (codename RONAN)

Downsides:

* Every bank/patch needs to be crafted from scratch, since the synth itself has none (can be generated via VSTi GUI)
* Formant voice synth occupies MIDI channel 16 and impossible to switch off (unless a code will be written for that)
* No drums at channel 10, requires additional coding for handling those
* Specific "techno" sound, might not be suitable for everything

Re: Preinstalled MIDI driver with sound bank on ReactOS?

Posted: Tue Jun 02, 2015 9:09 am
by middings
This looks like another downside:
https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/v2/README.txt wrote:To whom it may concern,

Yes, this source code is a total mess. Good luck getting it to compile...
I winced when I read that.