There any free, effective MIDI composition devices?

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Icecap Veiwin
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There any free, effective MIDI composition devices?

Post by Icecap Veiwin »

When I do get around to making my shmup, I want it to have my own music.

I've heard Noteworthy was good...
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Ataru
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Post by Ataru »

as far as free apps for making music, Garage Band is phenominal.
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TGK
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Re: There any free, effective MIDI composition devices?

Post by TGK »

Icecap Veiwin wrote:When I do get around to making my shmup, I want it to have my own music.

I've heard Noteworthy was good...
You might want to spend time searching for a friend who is a sound guy. It will be a lot of work to study midi composition from scratch...

I tried and gave up since I had no music background, so I recommend not to if you are starting from scratch too. Plus it's more common even for doujin teams to have a dedicated code guy & sound guy (& hopefully a dedicated graphics guy)
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karasuman
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Post by karasuman »

ztracker is pretty cool, if you are used to tracker programs like ScreamTracker, ImpulseTracker, etc.

http://ztracker.sourceforge.net/

I don't think you can import existing MIDI files, but you can create your own. I never made anything of real consequence, but it seems to be ok (though I am sure there are a lot of better programs out there).
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louisg
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Music in games

Post by louisg »

When you write a game which is to be played across multiple sound cards, using MIDI is probably not a great bet-- it is very frustrating to balance the mixer levels (and tones!) across patch sets. I would recommend you use either compressed audio or a tracker format such as XM or IT. XM and IT can both be played back with a variety of libraries such as DUMB (dumb.sf.net) and use typically little CPU (depending on how many channels are used, interpolation quality, etc).

Trackers are generally free, and most produce formats that you can play in-game easily. I would look into ModPlug Tracker just to start with if you are on Windows, or SoundTracker if you are on Linux. If you can get a DOS system to run (perhaps through emulation), I would suggest FastTracker 2 or Impulse Tracker-- those are still very good bets (but are more intimidating than ModPlug).

Renoise is a good tracker with synth and dsp effect support, but is unfortunately not free and will not produce sound formats which are playable (but can dump the output to a wave file).

Hope this helps!
Lou
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