Midi Music Driver (MMD98) playback support?

[MA113822]

Is it possible to add support for M.Kajihara's M.M.D. MIDI format? I can't find many players that natively support this format and converters to other more common formats are also hard to find. According to this person, the MMD format is an optimized version of RCP, so it shouldn't be too hard to implement.

[stuerp]

Do you have some example files?

[MA113822]

I’m currently not home right now, when I return I’ll send some examples.

[MA113822]

Here are some tracks from Story of Eastern Wonderland's MIDI soundtrack in M.M.D. format: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/166HheETztW7J4xq48-DCkmvHPu5-atR-?usp=drive_link

These were all composed with the SC-88 in mind.

[stuerp]

Thx. I'll have a go at it.

[stuerp]

Have a look at https://github.com/stuerp/foo_midi/releases/tag/v3.3.0.0-alpha1

Please try as many files as you can and let me know if there are any problems.

I'd appreciate if you could share more files.

[MA113822]

Looping behavior isn't accurate when compared to authentic recordings that we have and my own experience playing SoEW on an emulator with SCVA. It's a bit hard to describe with my limited technical knowledge, but it's easy to hear. I've also added the rest of the soundtrack from SoEW: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/166HheETztW7J4xq48-DCkmvHPu5-atR-?usp=sharing

Since we have authentic recordings of these tracks, I thought it would be a good reference.

[stuerp]

Could you be a little more specific: which track at which timestamp? I don't hear it. I tried a couple of tracks and with Secret Sauce I don't hear a difference?

[MA113822]

It's not a problem with a specific track but rather with how the decoder handles looping. I'll try to explain, but I don't really know the exact technical jargon, so bear with me.

First, each track has its second loop treated as part of the song itself, which results in the track reporting a longer duration than it actually is.

Second, sometimes tracks that have "loop points" (i.e., they jump to a certain part of the song and repeat from there rather than looping from the beginning) don't use them past that second "pseudo-loop." An example of this is with STAGE0.mid, where the loop point is used within the song, but when set to loop in the settings, it just loops from the beginning, which doesn't happen on original hardware or with emulation. I would share a recording from foobar, but looping doesn't work when you try to convert to a streamed audio format.

[stuerp]

First, each track has its second loop treated as part of the song itself, which results in the track reporting a longer duration than it actually is.

That's by design. foobar2000 is an audio player not a sequencer and I have to work within its framework. Prerendering loops is common to all supported formats. Recomposer has the same problem and that's why there's an "Expand loops" setting for it.

Second, sometimes tracks that have "loop points" (i.e., they jump to a certain part of the song and repeat from there rather than looping from the beginning) don't use them past that second "pseudo-loop." An example of this is with STAGE0.mid, where the loop point is used within the song, but when set to loop in the settings, it just loops from the beginning, which doesn't happen on original hardware or with emulation. I would share a recording from foobar, but looping doesn't work when you try to convert to a streamed audio format.

The loop logic described is definitely implemented but maybe there's still an issue with it. I'll focus on STAGE0.