💡FluidSynth MIDI Beginner Sound Font swap tutorial - 夢現の境界～奇跡の海～Mugen no Kyoukai - Kiseki no Umi
2To demonstrate that it can be fun to swap out sound fonts I found a game composer hosting MID (MIDI) files on their website. This is an obscure Windows 95 era visual novel game from Japan, with laid back tunes that probably aren't even hosted on YouTube as far as I can tell.
As shown here, you can easily switch out and render music using a Sound Font. A Sound Font is a collection of samples that plays back the music encoded within the MIDI file in a different way. Some people like to play around with unusual combinations of sound fonts such as using the music samples from Doom or Castlevania.
On his blog the author of these example MIDI files commented that the files were intended to be used with Roland SC-88ST PRO which is a real piece of hardware you can buy for around $300 USD. The Sound Font emulates the sounds that this hardware generates.
Of course, some sounds will be inaccurate or missing but for those interested in getting into game music production starting with MIDI and learning more about it is not a bad idea, and doing this swap trick is fun.
For comparison sake I found a Sound Font that generates arcade style OPL sounds with monster kick drum and percussion.
Tutorial:
1) Install FluidSynth from https://www.fluidsynth.org/
2) Find the bin path in your command line or file explorer and place some MID files in the same location
3) Place SoundFont files (SF2) in the same location, some are available from sites like Musical Artifacts
4) Simplest command to convert 1 MID file to WAV: fluidsynth -F out.wav RolandSC88.sf2 in.mid
You can also playback MIDI files directly using the software, or convert directly to compressed formats like OGG. Depending on the Sound Font MIDI playback can sound pretty amazing, and most people only associate MIDI with the default Windows playback methods. I am constantly reminded that there is a lot of depth to explore working with audio ranging from programming (https://people.carleton.edu/~jellinge/cs312_w2020/TOC.html) to things like MIDI editing in popular DAWs (check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCulcnyUDq4), if you are interested in music - go for it! Dive in!
Songs from: http://55thinktank.web.fc2.com/music/
Image: By Darklanlan - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49300492
0:00 etc_2.mid Comical Scene / SC-88
1:28 etc_2.mid Comical Scene / OPL Extreme Bass
2:56 gense_1.mid Today is good Weather / SC-88
3:36 gense_1.mid Today is good Weather / OPL Extreme Bass
#midi #gamemusic #mugennokyoukai #fluidsynth #tutorial