[IGDA Mobile-SIG List] Re: Mobile_Games Digest, Vol 13, Issue 8

[DrDon]

Hi Alex,

A few thoughts:

Assuming legal/licensing is not an issue, converting non-midi music to
midi can be a bit tricky but certainly not impossible. There are two
basic problems, a musical one and a more technical one that pertains to
handset capabilities.

On the musical side, someone with a good ear, musical training, and
decent tools can do the conversion. The difficulty lies in the music
itself and how well it lends itself to the General MIDI instrument set
in the phones. Some music is easy to do this with, while with other
types, the best you can hope for is a fair approximation. Anything that
relies solely on vocals will be a problem since there are no voices in
GM. Disco, Techno, instrumental HipHop, dance, dub, drum n bass, etc.
(basically any kind of non-vocal music), all lend themselves very nicely
to GM on phones and can be rendered in MIDI with acceptable if not great
results.

Regarding vocals, if they are made up of isolated phrases as in HipHop
and Rap, and your handset supports DLS (downloadable sounds), then the
vocals can be sampled and triggered within a MIDI file. along with the
MIDI instrumental parts.  This would be very cool. :-) The same is true
for music that has particularly unique sounds in it that are not in the
General MIDI instrument set.

The technical problem: Which handsets you're deploying on will also
effect the result. For example, some handsets have only a subset of the
complete GM instrument set. Instead of 7 different guitars for example
(GM has nylon string acoustic, steel string acoustic, muted electric,
clean electric, jazz electric, overdriven, distorted) they have only
one. If this one guitar is not close in sound to the right one, then
it'll be difficult if not impossible to get a sound similar to the
original.

BTW - FruityLoops is probably a lousy tool to try and do this with. It's
great for creating original loops but not good for converting existing
sampled songs. A basic MIDI sequencer is better for this sort of thing,
and easier to work with.

Another possibility is to do music that is "in the style of" rather than
licensing known works. This obviously wouldn't work if you also have the
rights to use the artist's names in your game as a selling/marketing
tool. But from a musical and gameplay point of view can be just as
effective and fun. In either case, you can probably save yourself a lot
of time and money by hiring someone who does this for a living :).

Hope this helps!

dd

Alex wrote:
> Hi, it's great to see that the list is moving again.
>
> Fellows, please advice: I'm doing a kind of Dance Dance Revolution game and 
> I'm having a hard time finding royalty-free midis. I've found a lot of wav 
> or mp3 music that can be licensed to be included in games, but nothing in 
> midi. I've come to extreme of downloading Fruityloop and follow the tutorial 
> to make my own music, which is off course a bad idea, given my musical 
> abilities.
> Any ideas? Where do you get your soundtrack music from?
>
> BTW: Yes, I know there are plenty of DDR clones, but we may have an edge, 
> we´re going to use Playboy (Southamerica)brand, so we may include sexy 
> pictures and use the brand to sell.
>
> Thanks!
> Alex.
>
>
>   
>> Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 11:44:17 -0800
>> From: DrDon <don at sonaural.com>
>> Subject: Re: [IGDA Mobile-SIG List] The Quiet Response
>> To: jeremy at groundspeak.com, Mobile Game Development SIG Mailing List
>> <mobile_games at igda.org>
>> Message-ID: <4419C011.40509 at sonaural.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>> I have found the same to be true of manufacturers. As an audio developer
>> for games, it's amazing how difficult it is to get basic information on
>> handset audio capabilities. Nokia is pretty good at disseminating
>> pertinent info but we've had a heck of a time trying to learn pretty
>> basic stuff from the other manufacturers. We've created audio for most
>> game platforms, and have never run into as much difficulty with any of
>> them.
>>
>> dd
>>
>>     
>
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>
>   

-- 

*Don Diekneite*

(408)799-6123
*Sonaural Audio Studios*

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