Musician Archive
Thread: Split Bandfill/Ommni sounds
If you have too many instruments per part, then they all sound bad, but over all once you add the higher instruments the songs all sound wonderful... IMO at least.
Hijo wrote:
No offense but have you checked to see if it is MIDI or not? The instrument samples are not that high of quality... they're on par with a good midi sequence. I'll check when I go home for lunch, I'm curious.
I know the sound bank of my Audigy 2 card and none of the sounds I'm hearing in game have come from it. I know because I write music with it. They could, of course, be loading their own soundbank, but that would require a Sound Blaster card (not on system reqs). Nor is MIDI on the system reqs. Further, adjusting the wave device volume affects the volume of the music in game--adjusting the synth volume has no effect. Even further, my career involves dealing with MIDI and sound in general and it is clear these instrument samples have been post-processed (wah wah, compression, bandlimiting filters, so on and so forth). Even further further...the sound would have changed if I plugged in my Yamaha S80, which was not the case. Also, have you noticed how some of the phrases can get out of sync with each other? In MIDI, the notes are fed ahead of time and processed based on a external clock sync...this async effect would simply not occur (everything would lag if lag were to occur). With wave samples, however, the synchronization must be handled by the application, where there is room for error if things get starved, for example. To further this point, you may have noticed that the resync when this occurs never happens in mid-phrase. Also also, it would be stupid to try and use MIDI for this because MIDI, as you pointed out, does not store any waveform information. It simply stores instructions to play existing samples. The samples, however, are different on every synthesizer so there would have been no way to guarantee that the songs/instruments would blend well on everyone's machine. It would also sound like crap for the people that don't have a good synthesizer on their sound card. Finally, the sounds themselves sound much better than low-end MIDI samples common to cards like the Audigy 2's stock soundbank. They are intended to sound the way they do--in other words, they are intended to NOT sound like real-life instruments (though it's obvious real instrument sounds were the bases upon which post-processing filters were applied to make them sound different).
To answer your question: No, I haven't checked.
If someone would like to prove me wrong, however, I would be very grateful.
Thank you for the unnecessary MIDI lesson. I use it as well. I also use a sound canvasing program that allows you to write music by synchronizing short wav files (loops). I use an audigy platinum as well, and I wouldn't say these sounds are any better than the onboard sounds there, except as you say some of them have reverb and whatnot added already. That can be done real-time though as well. The part I wasn't sure of is if they can have some type of midi device built-in to the game to be controlling things. Obviously it would have to load its own sounds, but those I was assuming would've been loaded into the built-in controller. Knowing midi does not mean I know anything about how it could/does relate to the game mechanics. What I do know is that I could write something that sounds very similar to any of the musician songs using a midi sequencing program.
I still think they are average sounds at best, sorry. 
Not bad mind you, just not anything special. The only thing special about it is that they have 8 flourishes for each song (for each instrument per song at that)which usually line up pretty darn well for the random mashing of keys that is done in cantinas. hehe But the sounds themselves are nothing to go gah gah over.
Why would you say that they were intended not to sound like real-life instruments? They sound exactly like real life instruments... sorry, I should say they sound exactly like real life instruments sound when you use midi. The horns, drums, marimba, piano, sax... it all sounds like your basic midi mapped sounds to me...
Hijo wrote:
Thank you for the unnecessary MIDI lesson.
You're welcome.
I use it as well. I also use a sound canvasing program that allows you to write music by synchronizing short wav files (loops).
This is exactly what I feel SWG is doing in game with these musical phrases.
I use an audigy platinum as well, and I wouldn't say these sounds are any better than the onboard sounds there, except as you say some of them have reverb and whatnot added already. That can be done real-time though as well.
It's really hard for me to distinguish between different and better. As I mentioned, I don't think these were intended to sound exactly like real live instruments because this is a science fiction world after all. (I will give you that the Nalagron sounds a lot like a piano and steel drum...). You can really only attributetimbre quality of a recording by comparing it true-life timbre of the same instrument. Since there's no real-life instrument that corresponds to the ones in game (have you ever seen a mandoviol in real life?), I feel there can be no attribution of timbre quality. As far aslistening quality (which I don't think you're referring to), I don't hear any distortion. Does that make sense?
The part I wasn't sure of is if they can have some type of midi device built-in to the game to be controlling things. Obviously it would have to load its own sounds, but those I was assuming would've been loaded into the built-in controller. Knowing midi does not mean I know anything about how it could/does relate to the game mechanics. What I do know is that I could write something that sounds very similar to any of the musician songs using a midi sequencing program.
I wouldn't doubt that you could. But it would sound different on someone else's machine because every synth has it's own sound bank. If the game had it's own synthesizer, the samples it draws from are still waveforms--meaning they can be whatever quality and sound that the designers chose (the same as having just simple waveform loops, which is easier to implement).
Given that, they probably would have had to implement something like this if they were to allow the actual composing of songs that they talked about early in beta. Boy would that have been sweet.
I still think they are average sounds at best, sorry. Not bad mind you, just not anything special.
Now that assessment I understand. You're basically saying the sounds that they did create and use aren't all that exciting or unique? Fair opinion.
The only thing special about it is that they have 8 flourishes for each song (for each instrument per song at that)which usually line up pretty darn well for the random mashing of keys that is done in cantinas. hehe But the sounds themselves are nothing to go gah gah over.
Why would you say that they were intended not to sound like real-life instruments? They sound exactly like real life instruments... sorry, I should say they sound exactly like real life instruments sound when you use midi. The horns, drums, marimba, piano, sax... it all sounds like your basic midi mapped sounds to me...
You could be right, but I still strongly believe they aren't sending midi commands to the sound card. Probably just the particular choice of sounds they used when mastering the music.
.
I still think they are average sounds at best, sorry. Not bad mind you, just not anything special. The only thing special about it is that they have 8 flourishes for each song (for each instrument per song at that)which usually line up pretty darn well for the random mashing of keys that is done in cantinas. hehe But the sounds themselves are nothing to go gah gah over.
Not that I disagree on the quality of the samples, but... I don't know of any other MMORPG that has anything even close to the ability to actually play music the way this one does. Just to keep things in perspective, you could easily have been stuck just spewing out particle effect notes while some canned Cantina Muzak plays in the background.
Keep this idea under your hat for awhile. I think more variety would be fantastic, but let's let them work on actual bugs first. Perhaps they could figure out a way to bothgive exp and take action pts when someone does a bandflourish. Seems like that might be easier and a better fix, overall.
lots of people have lots to say here and I apologize that I didnt read each of your posts, but I did want to add something...
Consider the solo act.
As it stands, and master musician/entertainer can literally turn the 10 "songs" at their disposal into a pretty darned good show. Some instruments just cant make some songs sound good though when performed solo, as we all know. Split the bandfill/ommni sounds out and suddenly you lose a few more of your limited resources as a solo artist (ceremonial rhythm section sans organ would basically be a bunch of tamborine flapping, oh boy!) You work so hard to get the rhytm section it'd be a shame to have it remain useless without a band.
I see your point, of course. I would love it if the rhythm could be split at will, so that if you had two on bandfill one could be bass/organ and the other drums/rattles as it would allow a more diverse performance. It'd also be nice if the /bandflo # (instrument) command were extended along with the stop start and change commands to allow for a band to setup bridges, solos, and whatnot more easilly. As it stands you almost need to be coordinating on teamspeak servers to try to pull that off with any degree of success. (not to mention that group chat has been bugged on my server all week... nothing like spamming the cantina with band chatter.)
Hijo wrote:
Thank you for the unnecessary MIDI lesson.
You're welcome.
I use it as well. I also use a sound canvasing program that allows you to write music by synchronizing short wav files (loops).
This is exactly what I feel SWG is doing in game with these musical phrases.
I use an audigy platinum as well, and I wouldn't say these sounds are any better than the onboard sounds there, except as you say some of them have reverb and whatnot added already. That can be done real-time though as well.
It's really hard for me to distinguish between different and better. As I mentioned, I don't think these were intended to sound exactly like real live instruments because this is a science fiction world after all. (I will give you that the Nalagron sounds a lot like a piano and steel drum...). You can really only attributetimbre quality of a recording by comparing it true-life timbre of the same instrument. Since there's no real-life instrument that corresponds to the ones in game (have you ever seen a mandoviol in real life?), I feel there can be no attribution of timbre quality. As far aslistening quality (which I don't think you're referring to), I don't hear any distortion. Does that make sense?
The part I wasn't sure of is if they can have some type of midi device built-in to the game to be controlling things. Obviously it would have to load its own sounds, but those I was assuming would've been loaded into the built-in controller. Knowing midi does not mean I know anything about how it could/does relate to the game mechanics. What I do know is that I could write something that sounds very similar to any of the musician songs using a midi sequencing program.
I wouldn't doubt that you could. But it would sound different on someone else's machine because every synth has it's own sound bank. If the game had it's own synthesizer, the samples it draws from are still waveforms--meaning they can be whatever quality and sound that the designers chose (the same as having just simple waveform loops, which is easier to implement).
Given that, they probably would have had to implement something like this if they were to allow the actual composing of songs that they talked about early in beta. Boy would that have been sweet.
I still think they are average sounds at best, sorry. Not bad mind you, just not anything special.
Now that assessment I understand. You're basically saying the sounds that they did create and use aren't all that exciting or unique? Fair opinion.
The only thing special about it is that they have 8 flourishes for each song (for each instrument per song at that)which usually line up pretty darn well for the random mashing of keys that is done in cantinas. hehe But the sounds themselves are nothing to go gah gah over.
Why would you say that they were intended not to sound like real-life instruments? They sound exactly like real life instruments... sorry, I should say they sound exactly like real life instruments sound when you use midi. The horns, drums, marimba, piano, sax... it all sounds like your basic midi mapped sounds to me...
You could be right, but I still strongly believe they aren't sending midi commands to the sound card. Probably just the particular choice of sounds they used when mastering the music.