Stop Saying "Sounds Like A MIDI"

[Brandon Strader]

You're spewing midichlorians like diarrhea. Good for you, sir Jedi

[analoq]

To further illustrate how MIDI is a protocol:

on the topic of collecting TCP/IP,

I used to listen to TCP/IP from my WebTV every day in my teens. VGMusic.com and RPGamer.com were fantastic sites to get "original" and "remixes" of game music back before the advent of the mp3 came around. I still sometimes go over to them and grab a couple of TCP/IPs i used to listen to

cheers.

[Crowbar Man]

Well, I was listening to the .mid file extension, which is a bunch of MIDI commands. I dont know what else to call the .mid file extention, it IS MIDI.

[munchi]

Hahaha, I remember way back in the day before I found OCRemix and VGMix (yes, that long ago) and I only knew about VGMusic. I thought midi files were the best thing ever and collected them. That collection ended up being deleted after I found the aforementioned places, however... >>;

So what's the correct term for "midirip"?

Yeah, I did the same thing...except I never deleted them

So, the correct term for "midirip?" It's midirip. As far as I understand it, a midirip is when a wannabe remixer takes (or rips) the midi data of a song, modifies the instrumentation, changes the the tempo and puts a drumbeat over it. So it ends up sounding much like the MGSWSWS that it came from. The fact that this term is accurate is probably one of the reason a lot of people think "It sounds like MIDI" is accurate. Watch the progession:

*someone listens to a bad remix*

"Hmm, it sounds like you just ripped the midi data and put a drum beat over it"

*this is accurate...but wordy*

"Hmm, it sounds like you just ripped the midi and put a drum beat over it"

*this is less accurate...and still wordy*

"hmm, it sounds like you ripped the midi"

*this is less wordy...but more susceptible to grammatical errors*

"it sounds like you ripped a midi"

* changing the "the" to an "a"...such a harmless grammatical error...this is where it starts to go way wrong*

"it sounds like a midirip"

*this is...nerd slang...so it's grammatically incorrect but the definition is accurate...so it's allowed...big mistake*

"it sounds like a midi"

*yup, we're so lazy we drop the rip, and now this statement is totally wrong*

"sounds like midi"

*we've completely downgraded to gibberish that once meant something; the nerd community starts a revolt and all internet hell breaks loose*

that's the way I see it.

[Flexstyle]

"sounds like a crappy Soundblaster"

Hmm?

[Brandon Strader]

"this sounds like a midi"

That is a perfectly reasonable statements. MIDI files that you can open and listen to are referred to as MIDIs. They have a distinct sound. There's no reason to say anything other than "this sounds like a midi" if something sounds like a midi.

[analoq]

Well, I was listening to the .mid file extension, which is a bunch of MIDI commands.

Yes.

I dont know what else to call the .mid file extention, it IS MIDI.

No. A MIDI file or .mid file is an IFF container of MIDI data, which is not equivalent to the Musical Instrument Digital Interface protocol.

Pedantic thread is pedantic.

They have a distinct sound.

No, they don't. That's the whole point. The point that has seemingly gone over your head. I like you Brandon, but you are a reputable ignoramus who needs to listen more frequently and talk less frequently.

cheers.

[Crowbar Man]

Brandon: Actually they do NOT have a distinct sound. They can sound like anything, they are simply instructions for playing instruments, and can sound as good or bad as the program, sound card, sample patch, etc being applied to GIVE it sound. Hence this thread

analoq: Thats a bit too pedantic. Especially since you refer to it as a MIDI file in your own correction

[Dissidia]

Dissidia: Maybe you mean sequenced?

As stated, One Winged Angel used in FF7 is being generated in real time using the PlayStations 24 channel PCM sound chip. It is not prerecorded or streaming audio in XA or RedBook. You can remove the disk and it'll keep playing. Its also been dumped in PSF formatcouple of MIDIs i used to listen to

Yes that's what I mean. I was always under the impression that the lyrics sung for OWA was the only exception in FFVII.

[Brandon Strader]

All modern computers have some form of midi mapper, midi files aren't exactly silent if you play them. I'm not going to argue this with mudslingers who deny the most basic of computer functionality...

Whether someone's computer is capable of playing soundfonts for their midis is irrelevant, most people probably don't have that technology, and the basic sounds for midi playback are pretty consistently bad. If you want to talk about people playing in kontakt and cubase then that is a completely different topic.

[Crowbar Man]

midi files aren't exactly silent if you play them

Speaking of basics of computer functionality, you cannot play a MIDI file without a piece of software/hardware to map instruments (ie the midi mapper you describe). The file itself has no definition of how it sounds. It can sound like anything. What a midi sounds like on your setup may sound different than someone else's computer. It can sound different on the same machine with another sound font. I wouldn't call people stupid when you don't know what you are talking about.

[anosou]

Too stupid to realize all modern computers have some form of midi mapper, midi files aren't exactly silent if you play them. I'm not going to argue this with mudslingers who deny the most basic of computer functionality...

I miss external General MIDI sound modules. They were ace (and poop on your post).

Oh and .mid files ARE silent if you play them and don't have anything that reads the midi data and produces sounds. Nobody cares what your PC was shipped with. That is kinda the whole point of this thread.

[analoq]

analoq: Thats a bit too pedantic. Especially since you refer to it as a MIDI file in your own correction

Yes, I referred to MIDI files as... MIDI files. How inconsistent of me! It seems you didn't comprehend my post so let me try to clear this up simply:

"listen to MIDI" (what you said)

Makes no sense. MIDI is a protocol.

"listen to MIDI files" or "listen to .mid files" (what would've been more accurate to say)

Makes sense as a MIDI file contains a sequence of MIDI events, which are typically musical.

cheers.

[Nabeel Ansari]

All modern computers have some form of midi mapper, midi files aren't exactly silent if you play them. I'm not going to argue this with mudslingers who deny the most basic of computer functionality..

This is actually half incorrect. If whatever sound player you have has no access to the Microsoft GM MIDI Wavetable or what have you, they will be silent. Because MIDI is sheet music for a computer, not sound.

MIDI's do NOT have a distinct sound. They have NO sound at all. What IS a distinct sound is like you said earlier, the MIDI Mapper on computers. It's usually the same on a lot of computers, but MIDI files themselves have no audio. And you can change the sounds that the MIDI channels are mapped to using a DAW or a sampler.

The sounds that are defaulted for MIDI playing and the actual MIDI file are two different things entirely.

EDIT: DAMN YOU ANOSOU FOR NINJA ING ME 8 MINUTES AGO.

Anyways, when people say "This sounds like MIDI", I'm pretty sure they are indeed referring to timbres of this "default" GM pack found on "every" (according to BS) computer which can be heard using Windows Media Player or something. They could also be referring to the fact that the sequencing is just mechanical and awful.

Both of these things are commonly associated with MIDI files, because, JUST LIKE SHEET MUSIC, it's just instructions. And a lot of computers have that basic GM sound set that it uses when you run a MIDI through WMP. As for referring to mechanical sequencing when saying MIDI, it's probably because there probably (could be wrong) wasn't a lot of thought going into humanization back then when MIDI was what was used for Video Game systems or other computers.

[zircon]

As stated, One Winged Angel used in FF7 is being generated in real time using the PlayStations 24 channel PCM sound chip. It is not prerecorded or streaming audio in XA or RedBook. You can remove the disk and it'll keep playing. Its also been dumped in PSF format

Music that keeps playing without the disk doesn't have anything to do with where the music is coming from, considering games can (and do) buffer audio into their memory as opposed to streaming 100% of it in real-time. But I think the key point about One Winged Angel is that the choir was recorded live. It is not comprised of individual samples sequenced together. There isn't any sequence of notes specifying what the choir is singing.

[Crowbar Man]

zircon: It does on the PlayStation, it doesn't exactly have the memory capacity to hold an entire prerecorded song in memory, especially RedBook CD Audio or XA. It doesn't have the CPU resources to do decompression of that scale either. One Winged Angel is sequenced, the choir singing are just samples of a choir singing. Its not anymore prerecorded than any other sample work. Again, the entire sequence has been dumped in PSF (PSX's sound chip dumps) format long time ago. Its only 4K, the entire audio engine with all its samples is 700K, the entire games sound track, including its sound engine in its entirety is only 900K.

[zircon]

So, you're telling me that you think there were specific MIDI instructions (or the equivalent) specifying the notes and note durations of the choir? Because there weren't. When I say "prerecorded" I mean that there was, at some point, a live choir which recorded the vocal part to "One-Winged Angel". That entire recording was mixed and reformatted to a lower bitrate/samplerate and compressed so it could be stored on the disc. The entire TRACK is not Redbook audio, obviously, but the music system is not assembling each word or note of the choir one at a time.

Whether that recording is being played back in chunks or in one continuous stream is beside the point... it's not accurate to say it's not "prerecorded" or liken it to synthesized sounds/MIDI scores.

[Nabeel Ansari]

I'm confused.

If each of the syllables in One Winged Angel was mapped to a MIDI key like Crowbar says, how would they implant those samples into the PSX sound chip? They had to be a recording because there's no way it (the sound chip) could just play each of the choir syllables by itself.

[Brandon Strader]

FF7 PC Version had the soundfont files on the disc, one of them included the vocal bits to One Winged Angel in it. You can open them and use their sounds.

They're not in there as "slices" per se, there's a key you can slap that makes them yell "SEPHIROTH!" and other keys that will sing the phrase of "vetti vetti vetti whatever"

It's not like you have to program in the SE, then the PHI, then the ROTH, it's similar to how you'd record pieces in a DAW actually, little natural pieces

[Nabeel Ansari]

FF7 PC Version had the soundfont files on the disc, one of them included the vocal bits to One Winged Angel in it. You can open them and use their sounds.

They're not in there as "slices" per se, there's a key you can slap that makes them yell "SEPHIROTH!" and other keys that will sing the phrase of "vetti vetti vetti whatever"

It's not like you have to program in the SE, then the PHI, then the ROTH, it's similar to how you'd record pieces in a DAW actually, little natural pieces

So they put those in a soundfont or similar sound pack file on the disc and the sound chip accesses them.

Thanks.

[Mustin]

Jesus Christ, people. Did you not watch the video?

1.) Please don't argue with zircon - he's one of the only people in this thread who know what they're talking about.

2.) To my knowledge, there is not one single video game system that used MIDI to playback music except for the PC. That's not how video game music was made.

3.) MIDI has no sound. That's all there is to it.

Do I need to make an instructional video? How is this more complicated than it should be? It's like people saying Daylight Savings Time. It's SAVING people! You wouldn't say, "I'm savings up for a trip to Florida!"

[pulls out hair and throws it around the room]

[Brandon Strader]

So they put those in a soundfont or similar sound pack file on the disc and the sound chip accesses them.

Thanks.

Sound chip?

I don't think I've ever actually made it to the end in the PC version to know for sure how it plays there. I know that the progress I did make in the game, all the music was played with Microsoft GS Wavetable generic thing. So it sound like a... err.... .... afk

[Monobrow]

Hi OCR.

I am just dropping by here from Twitter (Mustin tweeted this thread) to suggest that from now on, the term "MIDI" could be used as a unit for measuring the overall sample and production quality of a track. If a standard MIDI file played directly through a low-quality General MIDI synth can be measured as 1 MIDI, then perhaps the average track accepted on this site might be measured at 25 MIDIs. To keep things simple, a live recording with perfect production quality could be measured at a nice round number, like 100 MIDIs. But perhaps in the future, technology will exist that allows us to surpass the 100 MIDI mark.

Example of usage:

"This track only sounds like 7 MIDIs. You need at least 13 more MIDIs before it's acceptable."

or:

"Pongball, your SNES music sounds like half a MIDI."

Okay, back to being too shy to ever post here.

You all missed EASILY the best post in this thread.

This is why I <3 Pongball :J

[Crowbar Man]

So, you're telling me that you think there were specific MIDI instructions (or the equivalent) specifying the notes and note durations of the choir? Because there weren't.

I didn't say anything about MIDI. I dont know if Square uses MIDI in their sound engine or not. They could have though, as MIDI is flexable to do that. I imagine it would be easier to do it in a tracker though. But yes, they were. I don't know why are you convinced they are not, given the facts

The voice CLIPS (not the entire recording) were compressed and shrunk down to a lower bitrate, yes, and then used as a instrument sample. Its wavetable synth (PCM). Surely you are familiar?

[djpretzel]

Well, let's see...

1. "Listen to MIDI" - wrong, but I honestly haven't heard it used much
   
2. "Listen to a MIDI file" - technically more correct, but rather annoying, because few people say "listen to an MP3 file" or "view a JPG file"... the "file" is inferred from context, hence:
   
3. "Listen to a MIDI" - should be just fine, really; the article "a" clarifies the context as being a file, vs. a protocol
   

I think that reasoning is sound, and also covers the whole "Sounds like MIDI" vs. "Sounds like *A* MIDI" issue, which is more or less about grammar. I strongly believe in the syntactical value of articles, and would hesitate to rob them of merit in this context.

On to the thread title, "Sounds like a MIDI"... yes and no. We know WHY it's wrong, or at least most of us do - the actual audio output of compositional MIDI data is completely dependent upon the rendering, which is variable and inconsistent.

EXCEPT...

How truly inconsistent is it, in practice? Many of us use this operating system called "Windows", and a few others use OSX and Linux. Some use this software called Quicktime, others do not. Bottom line is, for the VAST majority of REAL, ACTUAL PEOPLE™ out there - and common usage can and often should dictate answers to questions like these - double-clicking on a MIDI (file) is going to produce a similar result. In probably more than 95% of scenarios, DirectSynth or Quicktime are going to be rendering said MIDI, and it *IS* going to sound a certain way, and that aesthetic IS going to have certain connotations for listeners. Largely, relevant to modern production values, negative connotations.

You can piss into the wind all you want to, but majority implementation of MIDI playback is really rather consistent, and it's exactly what people are referring to when they say something "Sounds like a MIDI". We can pretend we don't know what they're trying to say, but let's be honest: We do. We know that they're saying it the "wrong" way, but in this case the "wrong" way is also by FAR the most intuitive way. The "correct" way would be akin to saying "This sounds like a MIDI rendered by DirectSynth" or possibly the more streamlined "This sounds like Windows' default MIDI playback," but either statement is ultimately asking too much from the common man; remember, this is the Internet. Also, newsflash: People don't care about how computers, files, formats, etc. actually work - that's why Macs are popular

The best way to have prevented this WOULD have been (and still may be) having out-of-the-box MIDI playback rendered with MUCH higher quality by newer versions of Windows and OSX, so that a Windows 8 (hypothetical) user could clearly see that X MIDI file rendered vastly differently than on his or her older Windows 7 box. In over a decade, that hasn't happened, things have been stagnant, and it seems unlikely to change. I consider that to be quite unfortunate, personally, but the end result is that default MIDI playback, which most users will never stray from, has sounded quite similar for over ten years, probably more like twenty.

In other words, the misuse represents the facts of an unfortunate lack of development, in my opinion. I don't see any merit in preaching against what is in my mind clearly just a logical, predictable, very human symptom...