Following on from a discussion in the "Cheapo level packs" topic:

I've heard that it's very difficult to create Cheapo styles, but supposing that I just wanted to adapt an existing one with new musics (like Steaver did with the Lemmus styles) is this easy? How would I do it?

And (a separate question, though obviously linked) does anyone know whether it's possible to get MIDIs for the Lemmings musics that aren't in the Lemmus styles? (That's "How much is that doggie", the six ONML musics, and the four special graphics level musics other than Fun 22 which is in there. Maybe also the Tribes musics if they're any good, which I wouldn't know about.)

It's not very difficult to create Cheapo styles. Just follow the document "Custom Style File.doc" for details. I'm not sure, but I bet you'd have to change the actual .stt file and generate the new style to incorporate the music. Then again I haven't done too much with Cheapo styles so maybe someone else would have a better answer to your question.

I'm not sure where people would have all these other Lemmings MIDIs though.

Oh, it's certainly possible.  We're not talking rocket science here.  ;)

1) You might be able to search and find them on the Internet.  That would be the most expedient route if it works.  Sadly, the one video game music website that I've looked into, vgmusic.com, carries very few MIDIs of Lemmings, and I haven't found anything from ONML on that site.  (But it does have a surprisingly authentic-sounding "Menacing" music [the special graphics level for tricky].)  But there should be many other sites that carries video game and computer game music.

2) I know DragonsLover is working on MIDI versions of the music from PC lemmings, with the aim to make them sound like the PC version.  Though I'm not sure if he's gotten around to any of the music you particularly requested here.

3) Finally, there is yours truly.  If your search comes up empty-handed I'm willing to sequence all the music you've listed here for you.  With the caveats:

a) it'll take a while, probably at least 3 days per minute of music, 5 days if you want something more than just the melody and bassline.  Basically, you'd probably be done with the entire remake project before I finish.

b) you should tell me right off which version of the game I should base my sequencing off of, since whatever I end up with will sound a little like what I start off from.  I don't know which version has the "best" music.  I can't do the Mac version since I don't have a Mac.  For anything else besides the PC, you or something else will need to tell me where to download an emulator and more importantly, the ROM.

c) I can't guarantee you'd like the results since I'm not a professional, but I can at least guarantee that all the notes will be there and will be correct.


I think that version of Fun 22 in the Lemmus styles is long overdue for a redo.  It sucks.

The rest of the MIDIs in the Lemmus styles are actually verbatim copies of the MIDIs in the Windows version of Lemmings, which explains why they are acceptable.  As compare to the version of Fun 22 in the Lemmus style which is obviously an amateur effort, with some wrong notes to boot.

I have a version of Fun 22 I sequenced myself, based on the PC version (go to my website).  While not exactly spectacular I think it's at least a hair better than the delapidated version in the Lemmus styles.  I can also do a sequence based on the SNES version which I think will result in something people would like better.


That's a whole different question altogether.  The music in the Tribes actually vary quite a bit depending on which system you're talking about.  For example, the Sega Megadrive version have completely different music from the SNES version.  I think the SNES version is similar to the PC version but being the SNES, it sounds a whole notch better.

One nice thing about the SNES version is that there are programs out there to directly "rip" the music from a ROM (which I have), and other programs to convert them (with some manual corrections afterwards) to MIDI.  So making MIDIs of the SNES version of Tribes music will take relatively little effort.  But again, search the Internet first.

Actually, I wasn't thinking of these for the remakes set, but for my own level sets, which I'm hoping to get back on with working on once the remakes are over (estimated release date 6 May). So I'd be quite happy for you to do them if you'd be willing; I'd make the effort to search on the Internet first, of course. I'll let you know in a couple of days whether I've come up with anything.

Yep! I'm planning to sequence ALL Lemmings, Oh no more Lemmings and Lemmings 2: The Tribes musics based on PC versions, special levels included (and maybe the Holiday ones too).

For now, almost all original songs from Lemmings are done, only 2 or 3 songs are missing. I have also the special ones to do.

Also, I've sequence some remixes, but they aren't so good for now, they were my first compositions on Lemmings songs and it was only Electric guitar for the few first ones... Anyway, if you're interested, just contact me! :D

Here's another random link with Lemmings MIDI.  I wasn't even looking for MIDIs but a link in a page I visited via Google leads to

http://www.hamienet.com/cat543.html

Sadly, it doesn't have any MIDIs related to your requests.  In fact some are just blatant copies of the WinLemm MIDIs (gee, why am I not surprised).  However, a few are rearranged versions that are different from the WinLemm MIDIs, and in fact I'd say those are better than the WinLemm's!  B) (Well listen and decide for yourself.)

I don't think the site carries ONML music, certainly not on that particular page, but I'll look further and see.

I'm working on an Impulse Tracker song of ONML Level 1 (Down and Out Lemmings). It's coming along well, and my tracker makes it possible to convert to MIDI easily.

Cool.  Actually, I wouldn't mind hearing the impulse tracker version as well, even though I can't actually put it into a Cheapo style.

Which version of the game are you basing off from?  Just curious.  Actually, I haven't had much luck trying to find anything besides the PC version.

Good news:  with Essman's advice, I have just successfully incorporate a MIDI into an existing style.

Well, technically it's really just me creating a new style based on an existing style, but replacing the entire "Music" section of the style with my selection of MIDIs.  The nice thing about styles is that for each section you can either do the section yourself, or just reference stuff from another already-made style (.sty) file.  So in this case, I basically just did references for all the sections, in particular to CrystalLemmus.sty (well, kind of), and then do the "Music" section myself.  You should read the document on custom styles for more info.

One caveat though with referencing other style files:  it doesn't work if that style file you are referencing for the section in question, if that style file itself refers to something else.  In other words you can't reference a reference.  So ultimately you'd need to trace back to the style file that contains the actual real data, and to do that you pretty much have to just open up all your style files and guess and check.

But fortunately for the XLemmus styles we are okay, because they basically references either default.sty or one of Peter Spada's pre-made styles.

Here is an example of the file CrystalLemmus2.stt I used to try creating a working CrystalLemmus2.sty file:


Header: "Cheapo Copycat Level Editor"
Style: "Crystal with Other Lemmings Music"
Author: "Guest"

Sketches: "Default.sty"
End

Erasers: "Default.sty"
End

Sounds: "Default.sty"
End

Music:
Number: 2
File: "PCLemmings_FunSpecial.mid"
Done
End

Lemmings: "Default.sty"
End

Standards: "Default.sty"
End

Images: "Default.sty"
End

Graphics: "Orig-Blue.sty"
End

Objects: "Orig-Blue.sty"
End

TheEnd

Note that the blank line right before the "Header" line is important!  For the longest time I couldn't get the editor to accept the .stt file, and it turns out I need a blank line before the "Header" line.

As you can see, although this is supposed to be based off of CrystalLemmus.sty, not anywhere did I actually reference that file.  The reason is that CrystalLemmus.sty itself turns out to not contain any data of its own besides the music section.  Instead they either come from Default.sty, or in the case of the graphics for the terrain and objects, obviously from Orig-Blue.sty.

-----------------------

The above you should basically use as a template for redoing the other styles.  The only thing you'd change from style to style is the "Graphics:" and "Objects:" section, and it should be obvious which file to reference.

The "Music" section you'd of course never reference any style files, since the whole point is we're trying to add new MIDIs.  Well actually you can't really add MIDIs, so it's probably easier to just redo that section with totally new MIDIs instead and generate a new style off your .stt file.  Besides you get more slots for the new collection of music you want to include.

(Peter did mention that if you really want to just add music to, say, CrystalLemmus.sty, you can instead extract the MIDIs from that style file as follows.  Every time you playtest a MIDI in the level editor, the program makes a tempmidi.mid file (or maybe it's mididtemp.mid).  Just copy that file and you have a copy of the MIDI you just played that was in the style.)

--------------------------

Finally, some advice on the MIDIs themselves:

1) It seems that there is a little bit of a lag between Cheapo trying to play the music and when you will actually start hearing notes.  The problem being that if your MIDI has notes right at the very beginning, they might not actually be audible for some reason.  So be prepared to add a short moment of silence (probably no more than 0.5 seconds or something, experiment and find out) to the beginning of the MIDI to prevent note from being skipped over.

2) In any event, you definitely should playtest the MIDIs on a real level, not just in the level editor.  That will catch any issues with #1 above for example.  Also, it gives you the most accurate idea on what kind of volume you'll get when you actually play a level with the MIDI playing in the background, so you can adjust the MIDI accordingly to the desired volume.  To playtest the MIDI on a real level you'd need to generate the style with whatever MIDI you have, then create a level using that style, and then play the level.  A little annoying but it's helpful, and also helps ensure that you did the .stt part right.  (If not the level would either be unplayble or you would be unable to add terrain or objects in the level editor.)

3) Remember that every time you modify a MIDI file used in a style, you'd need to regenerate the .sty file from the .stt, to incorporate the changes.  It's just a one-step process so shouldn't be a big deal.

You know, I was having problems creating a *.sty file using an *.stt I created. I never had a blank line at the top of the document, so if I do that it should accept it. Thanks 'Guest'

Interesting about making copies of MIDIs, that should be useful :)

However, I've got a *.stt file that doesn't have a blank line at the beginning and has no problems being read in by the editor... so I'm not sure what the issue is there...

Hey guys.

I don't know if this helps any, but I did manage to get the actual .MED (not MOD?) music files from the Amiga version of Lemmings 2 The Tribes. With a program I found on the internet I can save them as .WAVS or .MP3's but I would like to convert them to .MID files. Does anyone know of a way to do this? I'm not really up on MIDI files but it seems to me we should be able to do this. Also, does anyone know of how I can extract the music files from Oh No More Lemmings (Amiga or PC/Win version)?

Thanks

Yeah, I had no idea that there was such a bug. None of my STT files ever had a blank line at the top.

Maybe my copy of Cheapo is corrupted or something.

If it matters, you can send me your copy of Cheapo and I can send you the .stt I had troubled with before.

(Later tonight that is, I'll be at work for a while.)

First of all, just to clarify, the guest who posted two posts above is not the regular guest.  This post is from the regular guest.  :P  So no, I haven't gone insane (yet), I'm not replying to myself.


Eek.  WAV->MID is the worst possible conversion.  It would be far better to do a MOD->MID conversion which would certainly be helpful.

Problem with WAVs are, they are just the raw sound waves, and computer science hasn't advanced enough yet to reliably extract musical notes out of raw sound waves.  You can find converters off the Internet, but most aren't too good and requires massive post-editing to get something halfway decent.


I imagine for the Amiga version you can do it via an emulator or something.

For the PC version I have already extracted, or more accurately, recorded the ONML music through the use of DOSBox (Ctrl-F5 captures to WAV).  DOSBox also has the feature to record directly the data sent to the sound card (Ctrl+Alt+F7) but I know of no programs that can actually do anything with such recorded data directly.

As far as I can tell the Windows version does not have the ONML music, just the levels.

The Lemmings 2 MODs will definitely come in handy though, thanks!

Yeah, I already tried one of those WAV 2 MID programs and you're right, they stink. But it's all really a moot point anyway because we need MID's for the music for Cheapo anyway. I know about recording WAV's from DOSBox and I can "record" the music from ANY Emulator or program but as I said we need MID's not WAV's.

How can I get you one of the MOD's that I ripped from Lemmings 2? I don't have a website to post them to.

I can also rip the .8SVX (Amiga's .WAV equivalent)instrument sound samples from the Amiga version if that might help.

Also, when I do a hex dump of the ONML "Disk" I see tune1, tune2, tune3, tune4, tune5, and tune 6 listed but I can't find the actual files. I'm sure they're in there somewhere.

Thanks
Guest2
(sorry about the confusion)

Oh silly me, the one time I inappropriately faked the e-mail field.

E-mail guestlevels 'at' yahoo.com.

Winamp can read and play those files in using an adlib plugin, and can convert them to WAV using the DiskWriter, but that's all I know that can done with those files.

Hey 'guestlevels'!

Did you get the L2 MOD's that I sent you? Have you had a chance to look at them or that Modplug Tracker program that I told you about?

Keep me posted!

As far as the ONML music goes, I need someone to help me figure out WHERE in the program is the music? I have both the WinUAE (Amiga emulator) versions in WHDLoad and .ADF format and I know the music is in there I just need to find out where and in what format are they? WHDLoad and ADF are simply "Disc images" and I'm sure that the two-byte pointer behind the names 'tune1', 'tune2', 'tune3', etc. are pointers to 'track and sector' but I don't know how they are stored in the file. One other thing I noticed about the Amiga version of ONML is that the files don't appear to be 'crunched' or compressed by any type of RNC encoding or ZIP or anything else so that should make it easier to rip them out of there somehow. I also have the PC Windows and DOS versions but that's a whole 'nother ballgame. Any suggestions out there?

Thanks,
Guest2

Yes, I received them, but I didn't get a chance to do anything with them yet.  I will keep you posted.


Sorry, I doubt anyone here knows, so you're on your own.  Actually Mike might know since he's one of those who were involved in the creation of Lemmings.  But he hasn't been hanging around the forums lately.

I want you to answer my question: Which version of Lemmings do you prefer for the music? Lemmings 95 or Dos Lemmings (Ohno, xmas)?

This is because I'm sequencing Dos Lemmings musics and I don't want these songs to be a waste of time if you still use the Lemmings 95 ones.

Just tell me if my musics are good! Email me if you want them!

Don't ask, just go ahead and do them.  ;)

I mean, you saw (um, hear) Adam's recent styles.  All he did was to take the existing Lemmings MIDIs in the existing Cheapo styles, and just change the instrumentations.  And this is different enough for some people to choose to use the new music.

Besides, does Lemmings 95 (the Windows version, right?) even have music for ONML?  Also, there's no point to sequencing the music for that version, in the Windows version the music are already MIDI files I believe, so the only thing left to do with them is just to rearrange or remix based on those files.

Some slightly bad news:  somewhere Google brought up [u]this site[/u].  Go to that page and search for the section titled "The custom format".  Note in particular this sentence:

"The real problem for me is that Lemmings and Battle Squadron, of all games, both use custom format music, and these are two of my favourite soundtracks."

Now, to be sure, it just says "Lemmings" and not ONML, so maybe ONML uses a more standard format like MOD.  But chances are good that like Lemmings, it will be in a format no one knows about.

I got them to play in Modplug Tracker.  As for conversion to MIDI, annoyingly it seems that the only program out there to do that is 2MIDI.  Still, that's better than no program.  I haven't actually tried the program yet though.

One factor that's keeping me from moving forward faster with the MOD is, the music is pretty nice but I still think the SNES's music is better (not a big surprise, we're talking about 8 channel, 16-bit stereo music vs. 4 channel, 8-bit mono music).  Nevertheless I'll try to download the trial version of 2MIDI and try it on at least one of the L2 MODs I like.

Actually I think someone had cracked the Lemmings 1 format.   I remember downloading actual Lemmings data files and it came with a file like "Lemmings.CUSTOM" and it could be used to play the files in Deli Player.  I can send this to someone if they want to check it out.

EDIT: Also, it came with data files for OhNo and Xmas lemmings, so I believe they use the same format.

Mr. KSoft:  interesting, I'll look into that.

-------------------

I've finally got around to creating some MIDIs.  Well, actually just one for now, and it's one of those that I made with conversion programs, though it turned out surprisingly well.

This is from the SNES version of Lemmings 2, the theme for the Shadow Tribe.

http://www.geocities.com/guestlevels/lemmings/shadow.mid

Other than a few touch-ups with overall volume, this MIDI is actually practically done.  Of course, the bane of MIDIs is that they never sound the same on different sound cards.  They shouldn't differ too much, but if you're hearing really strange notes on your computer, tell me about it and I'll see what I can do.

My next set of goals is to do convert the other SNES music for Lemmings 2.  After that I might start releasing a set of new styles with these MIDIs.

Hi,

I'm just starting work on my new sets now and I've finally managed to get the hang of creating styles; so I was wondering how far you guys have got. I do like the Shadow Tribe MIDI but I'm more interested having the ONML ones since I wanted to add those to my styles..... and I haven't got anywhere with looking for them on the internet.

Could any of you who currently have any Lemmings-related MIDIs send them to me (zarathustra47@yahoo.com) so I know which ones haven't yet been done by anyone? Many thanks.

A quick update on the Lemmings 2 MOD.  Unfortunately, 2MIDI can't even load the files, even though they play fine in Modplug tracker.  So no conversions of them for now.  But as I've said, I'm probably more likely going to end up converting the SNES version of the music anyway since that seems to be the easiest option for me.

Since Ahribar is more interested with the ONML music and since it seems to be the least available, I'll probably put off the L2 stuff for now.

I briefly looked at Deliplayer and the related Delitracker.  From the little I can gather in 10 minutes, it appears that DeliPlayer/Delitracker deals with custom formats by actually emulating the CPU and sound subsystem of an Amiga.  The custom format modules actually includes both the music data and the Amiga binary (machine code) for the custom music player.

So I don't think it's really true that the format has been cracked, just that someone was able to isolate the part of the Amiga Lemmings program responsible for playing music.  So a conversion remains somewhat unlikely at this point.  What a bummer considering it is one of the few sources of ONML music.

That being said, do send what you have to guestlevels 'at' yahoo.  Maybe the custom format is similar enough to a standard format that something can be done with it.  One can hope anyway.

Guestlevels: Not bad! You got farther than I did that's for sure. I'm not real crazy about that Shadow music to begin with but you did a good job of reproducing it.

One thing I noticed about Modplug Tracker was that it was reading some of the bytes in the original MOD as a tempo speed-up. Especially in the Classic and Circus MOD's. Once I figured out how to stop that they sounded pretty good. As I said, I'm still learning about the program itself and MOD's and MID's in general. It is still messing up some of the instrument sound samples also. I'm not exactly sure why.

What about that "Export as MIDI" option? How in the world is that supposed to work. I've tried all sorts of things, trying to find intruments on my PC that correspond with the Amiga instruments and so on, with disastrous results. You should hear some of the garbage I've come up with!

On another note (sorry), when I look at the Amiga 'Holiday Lemmings' .ADF files I see 'SoundPlayer V4.05 (C) Scott Johnston  12/3/1991' which makes me wonder if those tricky fellows at DMA Design didn't use this program or some variation thereof to do/play the Original Lemmings or ONML music? Just something to think about.

I'll keep trying to find a way to get the original ONML musics out of the program and into MID format.

If anybody is interested I have all of the Lemmings 2: The Tribes graphics and objects in Cheapo-ready-go .BMP format directly from the L2 'astyle.dat' files. I even did the 'catapults', 'cannons' and 'roundabouts' as objects not that we can actually use them like they are used in L2 but it's still kind of cute to have them in some of the test levels that I did.

Keep me posted,
Guest2

P.S. Ahribar: I'll send you what few MID's I've got but they're are probably ones you've already got.

Thanks! Gratefully received..... there was one there I didn't have yet, the one called "LEMMING5B", and I'm very pleased to have got it!

This thought just struck me.

Why are we so concerned with getting the ONML music in MID format. I've got ALL of them in MP3 format. Maybe we could talk Steve into incorporating the use of MP3's as background music instead of having to use MID's?

I mean, in the days of the original Lemmings hard drive space was at a premium and smaller file sizes (MID's) were preferred but in this day and age of 250 Gb hard drives and 2Ghz processors why couldn't we just use MP3's as the background music?

Just something else to think about. Let me know what you think.

Guest2

Sorry Ahribar, I was busy typing another post and didn't see yours.

I'm glad you got them. Yeah, that Lemming5B is just a variation or 'remix' of Lemmings5 but it sounds good. Not sure where I got that.

Later
Guest2

It's Peter actually, not Steve.  It's not a bad idea except this means we'd be talking about 20 MB style files......

I don't know how people feels about downloading that.  Certainly the 56k modem users will be very annoyed.  ;P

Hmm, didn't know Modplug tracker has this.   I'll try it out and see.


You must have not played lemmings too often.  Scott Johnston (or some name like that) is credited in the game as the person responsible for the music.  ;P  So yes, DMA Design used that program since one of their guys wrote it!

It could be true though that this player might have been used for more than just Lemmings, and so maybe someone out there would know something about it and therefore something about the format of Lemmings music.  Not me though.

In fact, even the non-56k modem users may have some issues to deal with.  Some site hosts, such as Yahoo Geocities, put limits on the site's traffic so that if more than X MB of data was downloaded from a site they host within say an hour, the site is shut down for a certain amount of time.  And with Yahoo, I've found that you can't download more than, for example, 4 1 MB files in one sitting without triggering the shut down (an hour).

So unfortunately, even in the days and age of Ghz computers and GB hard drives, uploading and downloading hasn't quite totally caught up yet.  That being said, these issues are not insurmountable either.

Yeah, hadn't thought about the style files having to contain the whole MP3. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Guest2

P.S. Sorry 'bout that Peter! Don't know where 'Steve' came from!

Just want to update everyone that MIDIs for the ONML music and the Lemmings "special graphics levels" music are coming along quite well.  This is because I finally wrote a converter to convert the sound command capture files (*.dro) from DOSBox to MIDI.  It's not an automatic conversion but it certainly saves time from having to enter all the notes manually by hand.

I'm going to start a new post for people to comment on MIDIs that I have sequenced through this effort.  Only 1 so far (not counting the raw conversion MIDIs which is only half the work needed).

guest, you don't need. I'm already sequencing them by hand. Ok, it would be probably very long, but the quality of the songs will be better too.
By the way, I already completed two of the special levels: "Menacing" and "A Beast of a Level I"

Want to hear them? Email-me!

Not to be rude, but I see no reason why the creation of Lemming MIDIs has to be monopolized to you alone, DragonsLover, as you seem to be implying.

I've heard your MIDIs.  They are good, but I can definitely tell you that if I were making them I probably would have made different choices regarding various things such as instrumentation etc.  Keep in mind that MIDIs can sound quite different depending on which sound card you are playing them back on, so what sounds great on yours might or might not work as well on other ones, so it's probably best to have a diverse mix of MIDIs even of the same songs.

And as for quality, we can let people in the forums decide.  I think it would be a mistake for you to think that my work is just pressing a button.  I spend quite a lot of time afterwards in deciding on instrumentations and on balancing the volume amongst the parts.  I'll admit that as much as I'd like to, I don't have the time or resources, and to some degree the experience, to really perfect the MIDIs, but at the same time the world can't wait forever, and music is subjective anyways.

I will also like to point out that one benefit of the conversion process is that it does guarantee you won't be missing any notes or having the wrong ones by accident.  Which I have to say I've found a few in your MIDIs.  Infrequent, and certainly nothing that would be a showstopper per se, but I can definitely pinpoint them out if I'm forced to.

Ok, I guess I overreacted at the end of a long day.  Sorry for ranting a bit harshly over this.

That being said, the point stands in that I want to emphasize I'm not merely going to do a half-ass job in order to mass-produce the MIDIs in a short time.  In fact if I were to do a half-ass job, I can already just post right now all the raw conversion MIDIs of all the "missing music" Ahribar requested and be done with it--and no one would want them because they would definitely sound half-assed.

I can understand what DragonsLover had said in the context that the MIDI apparently didn't play correctly in his sound card so that he couldn't hear the correct instruments.  And I'm sure there are plenty of improvements to anyone's MIDIs, and certainly mine.  But with the amount of time I've spent on this, I can't help but overreact a little at the end of a mediocre day over the implication that I'm trading off quality for speed.

That's simply not true.  I'm perfectly capable of doing them all by ear but getting all the notes down is for the most part not very interesting, it's like dictation.  The conversion program is simply like a dictation secretary, a way for me to quickly get me to the point where more interesting and meaningful work can be done.  As I said, it's only half the work.  The MIDIs I'm posting will have all gone through at least one round of instrumentation and balancing, and possibly more detailed work as time permits.

And I might add that although I didn't explicitly say it, the MIDIs I made are released in "public domain" (ignoring the technical legal issue that the real copyright holder is Scott/Brian Johnston), so feel free to take whatever I post and make improvements to them as you desired.

I figured in the interest of possibly speeding everyone's work on the MIDIs, I'm going to upload a tool I've written that can playback the .dro files you get from DOSBox's OPL capture feature (Ctrl+Alt+F7).

I could upload my conversion program, but for various technical reasons I don't think it's a good idea (mainly, it's currently written to be used in such a way that you re-compile the program for each conversion; in short, not easy to use for the average user).  But if you insist you can e-mail me for the conversion program as well.

Anyway, if you download

http://www.geocities.com/guestlevels/lemmings/testdro.zip

Inside the zip file is testdro.exe, a DOS program.  You use it by invoking the program in the DOS Prompt along with the name of the .DRO file you want to playback.  For example, if the .DRO file is lemmings_000.dro, you'd enter in the DOS prompt

testdro lemmings_000.dro

The program is actually meant to be used in DOSBox.  You're not likely to hear any music if you use it in straight DOS, anymore than you'd hear music in Lemmings itself under straight DOS.

The main feature that makes this possibly useful is, you can mute and unmute individual channels as you listen.  The Adlib music synthesizer that the Lemmings music are playbacked on has 9 channels numbered 1 thru 9.  Using the corresponding keys on your keyboard, you can toggle the mute/unmute status of each channel.  In addition, the "P" key lets you pause and unpause the playback at any point (and you can do toggle the mute/unmute during a pause as well).  To stop playback, just press any other key and the program will exit.

So instead of having to tease out the notes of a particular instrument within the haystack of the 4-5 instruments that might be playing at the same time at any moment, you can now hone in to just one particular channel at a time, which generally corresponds to one specific instrument.  Depending on the music and your ears, that might be of help.  You can also try it on music other than the ones from Lemmings, but be warned that this program does not have proper support for the full features of the sound card, so .dro files captured from other games might or might not playback properly.

I'll investigate the usage of MP3s. Even though the size is large compared to MIDI, if someone REALLY wants to use MP3, they should be able to.

guest, :agree:

I don't want to be "the only one" to sequence MIDIs. If you sequenced some, that's ok! Then, if you've found few mistakes in my songs, then talk me much about that to see how could I correct them.

Also, I'm interested for the conversion program. Just email-me!

Okay, I'll e-mail you the conversion program, but since it sounds like the MIDI-editing program you are using have (understandably) a lot of trouble with the MIDIs my conversion program produces, I'm not sure how useful the conversion program might be for you.

And thanks for being gracious in the face of my harsh comments.  I really regretted posting some of them, I wasn't in the right frame of mind back at the moment.  X_X

I only have one problem with your MIDIs, but it is quite a serious one. They don't sound too great when looped; the music "sticks" and comes to a stop before going back to the beginning. Obviously, since my main interest in these MIDIs is that I want to use them in Cheapo styles, that is going to matter.

However, other than that your versions are really great! Could you e-mail me the "Beast" one? You already have my address.

I think the problem you have with looping is actually a Cheapo problem as well.  I've noticed from the very first time I start using Cheapo that whenever it reaches a loop point, it almost invariably always makes a gap of silence, even if you set the MIDI such that the loop point should transition with no gaps back to the beginning.  This happens on practically every MIDI including the ones included in default.sty, so it seems to be a Cheapo issue rather than problems in individual MIDIs.

It also doesn't help that Cheapo tends to not correctly played back notes at the very beginning of the MIDI, so the traditional fix is to insert a short gap of silence (about 1/4 of a second or so) at the very beginning.  But this only exasperates the problem with looping.

I'll have to investigate further to see whether it just so happens that all the MIDIs Cheapo uses have gaps at the beginning or end, or whether instead it really is an issue in Cheapo (I suspect the latter).  The way to get around it is to make sure you end the MIDI with either a true, musical ending, or to do a fade-out style ending, so that the gap of silence between looping is not noticeable.  (Some of the MIDIs included in the default style seems to do this.)

Hmm, yes, you're right of course.

Somehow it just seems more jarring on DragonsLover's MIDIs than it does on (for instance) the Lemmus ones.