The Ultimate Guide to MIDI Ripping (PC Games)

I reckon this video is not for everybody, but some of you may find it interesting. I tried to make it as simple as possible, so I hope it's going to help you. Enjoy.

or

00:00 - Intro
00:30 - What is MIDI?
03:04 - How to get the MIDI out? / Easy way
03:34 - How to get the MIDI out? / Less easy way
04:50 - How to get the MIDI out? / A bit difficult way
05:25 - How to get the MIDI out? / Horrible way
06:26 - Hardware recording / General MIDI
15:17 - Hardware recording / MT-32
19:28 - DOSBox / General MIDI
23:40 - DOSBox / MT-32
25:22 - DOSBox / FM Synthesis

[ThBeowulf]

Brilliant. Right up my ally and now added as a (hopefully near) future project.
Thank you!

[StevenLeung]

Very cool :) I'll probably give this a try with the few DOS games I still play

[SianaGearz]

MP3 was of course not usable, but SEGA came up with something smart back in the day, ADX, which is a multi sample prediction ADPCM. Instead of one sample history like IMA, uLaw and Microsoft ADPCM, it uses two samples for prediction, the compression ratio comes out to 4:1 compared to 16-bit source material just like those other ADPCM schemes, but with way less noise and distortion. Additionally, it's not actually necessary to use the full 44100Hz sample rate of CD audio, some hardware interpolation and approximately 32KHz works fine. Indeed many MP3 and similar encoders simply chop off everything above 16 KHz thereabouts, because as it turns out, that while people (at least young people) can hear to 20KHz, it is fundamentally impossible to tell all frequencies above 16.5 KHz apart, and even telling apart 13 and 16KHz is a pretty tough challenge, the frequency resolution of human hearing ends up pretty low up there. It's also common for speakers and headphones to just peter out at 12KHz or lower, and even nice speakers suffer top end diffraction which makes the response very spotty there. So yeah about 5.5-6:1 compression is possible with very simple math that is suitable for 486-class systems. They used this on the Saturn and then Dreamcast, and it's been licensed out to various game developers for other systems as well.

Another two sample prediction scheme was XA ADPCM, designed by Sony and Philips and used for video cutscenes and streaming audio on Playstation. It's also fairly decent.

Another CODEC i have been experimenting with that is much lighter than MP3 is MPEG1 Layer2, it also sounds very nice if you give it bandwidth to breathe.

Today there's a new ADPCM codec QOA which is just 3 bits per sample and makes use of all the same tricks as ADX, not bad.

There were of course games with low quality DPCM music on PC like say Cyberia. Heck this continued until recently - Test Drive Unlimited has bad ADPCM, what were they even thinking?

But yeah none of this detracts from how much i loved MIDI. But also... i mean very few people actually heard good MIDI. Most PC games were authored on a Sound Canvas in GM and then played in Adlib compatibility mode with generic patches, often with buggy OPL3 clone chips but using none of the enhanced OPL3 features, and some cheaper "wavetable" add-on cards sounded just weird. So while it was nice for me with my array of MIDI devices, i think from general consumer perspective, MIDI music was more of an unfortunate part of DOS game reality.

[simonabbott]

Maybe Bobby Prince wrote Doom E1M1 like that😂

[Pickle]

yeah dabbled a little with recording to try to debug why exp midi pcmcia played doom with piano instruments.
Id suggest anyone who needs a midi device to look into the roland um-one. Its probably the cheapest option to capture midi.
Thanks for the guide and mentioning these other tools.

[milahs]

for the easy way, what program are you using to get into the directory of the file?