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folks who port from midi

porting from an midi is usually considered the "big leap" you take when you start taking porting seriously, but a lot of times midis aren't very reliable and often require just a little less effort than porting by hand. wrong notes, missing channels, and bad instrumentation plague the average midi you can find on the likes of vgmusic, so between finding a good midi and adjusting the mml petitemm spits out, it takes about as much effort as porting from scratch to make a decent port from an midi.

a lot of the porters i come across (including myself) usually port by hand and ear, so this got me thinking. who continues to port from midi despite the disadvantages it presents?
That depends. Does viewing the MIDI as sheet music in an editor and writing down the notes from that while listening to the original track for any wrong notes or missing channels count?

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Years ago I used to hand port, but lately I find the conversion process of porting from MIDI incredibly convenient. Though I prepare all of the MIDIs myself. What I usually do is use C700 VST to sketch out my ports in FL Studio and then export as a MIDI file and convert with petitemm. This gives me a reasonably accurate idea of what the final SPC will sound like, and being able to edit the music and get instant audio feedback in real time is a must for me. Porting by hand doesn't have this advantage, so I find it extremely tedious and painful.
Not all MIDIs are bad, tho. In fact, there's way more accurate MIDIs than bad/innacurate ones. Really, it all comes down to what you're porting anyway. For example, something famous (like Megaman) would have WAY more MIDIs, not only bad ones, but also more accurate or ones that are good enough for porting. Plus, most of the time, you can use VGMTrans to get a much more accurate MIDI than VGMusic can offer, so, yeah...
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Originally posted by Jimmy
This gives me a reasonably accurate idea of what the final SPC will sound like, and being able to edit the music and get instant audio feedback in real time is a must for me. Porting by hand doesn't have this advantage, so I find it extremely tedious and painful.

porter mode in amkgui is utterly invaluable for this exact reason

though doing it in fl studio gives you a better interface than plain text, which would be a nice advantage that porting by hand definitely doesn't have.

Originally posted by Theultimate12
Not all MIDIs are bad, tho. In fact, there's way more accurate MIDIs than bad/innacurate ones. Really, it all comes down to what you're porting anyway. For example, something famous (like Megaman) would have WAY more MIDIs, not only bad ones, but also more accurate or ones that are good enough for porting. Plus, most of the time, you can use VGMTrans to get a much more accurate MIDI than VGMusic can offer, so, yeah...

true, but a majority of those 'good' midis will inevitably need to be trimmed a lot due to single channel chords, and sometimes, having more notes than can be clipped into 8 channels.

i mean, i ain't knockin' it if you port from midi, it's just taking some effort to put myself in your shoes and understand why
Sometimes I put a LOT of efforts on MIDI editing, since porting with ears may waste more times.

The worst case I met is the MIDI sounds decent, but the note length is not standard (probably recorded directly from a MIDI electone when somebody playing the song):
Code
o4 c=73 c=74 c=72 e=38 ; blah blah

I have to re-analytic the length of each note, which is painful.
@tcdw: I usually try quantizing note lengths in FL Studio when that's the case. Some (very few) notes end up having wrong lengths after the process, but they're easy to track down and fix.

As for me, I don't (ever) port by hand because:

1) I don't even bother with MIDIs that aren't at least 95% accurate (note-wise). Actually, I try my best at putting my hands on ripped MIDIs before trying anything else because they're guaranteed to be accurate.

2) PetiteMM works perfectly well if you know what commands to use, and if you get the MIDI all fixed and tidy (quantized) before running it.

3) I have enough experience to quickly track down eventual errors and fix them in the txt. I advise porting by hand for beginners though. It's a good practice to learn the MML syntax.

edit: moved to Custom Music.
I actually meant to make a thread about this a number of times, but wasn't brave enough to do it. While I'm proud of my progress in working with the Snes, I do wonder if I'm doing things in an inefficient way. Long post ahead though, so be ready for that or skip it. Lol

When I started using MML, I did it all by hand. Everything made enough sense to me that I wasn't discouraged or overly confused once I experimented a bit. I heard about midi to mml converters, but I tried one once, can't remember what it was, and had a lot of trouble. That was almost 10 years ago though, so things have changed. And I wasn't as bright with such stuff back then so I probably did something stupid that made it not work. Lol

Since then, I got pretty good at doing things by hand, but I often get myself in a tough cycle. I have to try something, compile, listen, edit, compile, listen, edit, etc. At present I do it with notepad to make the mML, a command prompt with AddmusicK with the norom option to make the spc, and Snes SPC700 Player to listen. I tried porter mode in amkgui and for some reason it kept saying it couldn't find my song so I just use command line now. I still enjoy porting a lot despite the somewhat torturous nature of the process I described. I know I've improved a lot and picked up a lot of speed, but I sometimes wonder if I'm grinding my gears too furiously in the wrong direction.

The reason I haven't tried midi converters yet is severalfold. The big one is that I'm nervous that it ultimately won't be worth it, or I'll stubbornly stick to my old ways before I give anything else a chance. But it's something I want to look into because when I do MML by hand, I arrange it in my head mostly, which is outright painful and intolerably frustrating. With midi that would be made easier. While I'm fluent in a midi editor, I've not often tried doing this sort of task.

Because I'm blind, I'm unable to use C700 to hear my samples as I arrange, so that's out. Other options like converting brr to wav and using another sampler seem to be a little more involved. I've started doing that but never really went headlong into it. I'm also really not quick at reading people's mml other than my own, because the familiarity that comes when writing by hand just isn't there when looking at someone else's MML. I suppose overcoming this is a matter of practice really. I know it is since I've gotten better, but it's still something I struggle with.

I recently got some advice while talking to someone about this a few weeks ago. He told me that he sometimes forgets the samplers and just uses a piano or a generic synth to do the midi. But other people like having the brrs in their daw. Not sure which is better for me. If I don't have them in a DAW, then I won't be tempted to go overboard with the midi before I convert it. If I do have them in a DAW, then I'll have a better handle on the sound before the MML editing stage.

If I have to sum this whole post up, I think the main question I'm driving at is, am I stubbornly sticking to my comfort zone and holding myself back, or is it more of a personal preference which is just another way to work? I know only I can answer that for myself, but I feel like I need more perspective from people who work in different ways. I'm especially curious about the workflow of those participants of Idol who make it to the finals. I'm not ranking or ignoring anyone though, so I'm all ears!
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Even though I sometimes download midis made by other people, I tend to fix every inaccuracy they have or make my own midis if there isn't one in the internet. I use petitemml because it's a pretty good and accurate program and I never thought porting by hand was better, MAYBE it was when we only had tinymml since it didn't support triplets, but these days with petitemml available I personally don't have to worry about that stuff anymore.
I prefer going by hand rather than having automatic conversion tools simply because I can keep control of what I do easily.
Using automatic tools always penalized me in terms of looping and figuring out what point of the music I'm in.

As for midi's accuracy, what others said apply to me too: I always have the midi, the txt and the original open at the same time, so if I identify an inconsistence in terms of notes, I try my best at fixing it.
While doing MMLs by scratch is indeed a very good option, I think I'm slowly inching more to PetiteMM at this point, mostly because of the fact it actually exports the correct note lengths from the MIDI itself, which honestly's a lot better than blindly getting the right note lengths by memory, since it isnt really certain you'll be able to get them right the first time. I agree it can get a bit hard to traverse through the MML compared to doing it by scratch tho, but I always look at the notes in FL then check to see if the MML has those same notes anyway, so I'm not always lost lol
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Well, I do agree most MIDIs out there are garbage, reason why I make my own when not using loveemu's converters. Now, I used to re-create the whole song in a DAW with C700 + the song's original brr samples, but after a while this just seemed like a waste of time. It's just too much effort put in for no reward other than live preview. Not to mention that the vst will never get the same sound as your SPC700, no matter how you tune it, so you'll most likely end up having to re-tune it when passing down to a mml.
The method I'm more comfortable with is having the MIDI play with default MIDIOut samples in DAW, then write it by hand. Petitemm is pretty accurate too afaik, still, I prefer to transcribe it myself so I get to feel more of the song. I wish I were skilled to the point where I could write my songs straight up in a mml file without the use of a MIDI to read as sheet.

I can see where you come from though, @MercuryPenny. It has become quite common to see some garbage ports that seem to be made in less than 10 minutes, most times the reason being it's just a MIDI downloaded out of Vgmusic and instantly converted with Petitemm. However, you shouldn't blame the tools (midi and petitemm), but instead blame the people who put next to no effort on their songs. There are many songs that are made with the same tools and sound incredibly good - and it's convenient for the porter.
I still use MIDI + PetiteMM, but 99% of the time I make the MIDI myself which is why I now find it a waste of time to write the MML by hand, because that would mean to rewrite something I already wrote and that's just too inefficient. PetiteMM is very accurate (too accurate tbh) so it's a huge time saver and I don't have to worry about weird/off rhythm notes that would take me a bit of trial & error to get right. I can't really trust other people's MIDIs (unless I'm 100% sure the source is reliable), so I'm fine with this process.

I do sometimes use automatic music converters like loveemu's, especially when I know the tool supports the music engine of the game I want to port from, usually just cuz I just don't feel like doing an accurate MIDI from scratch when a program can get the exact same result in a second and so I can just focus on the SPC700 part. I don't have trouble reading MML, so I can quickly see where I'm located in the song, and usually just seeing the notes in my MIDI editor's piano roll can easily help me detect loops and repeated patterns.
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everything i do in spc anymore is written in openmpt and then converted by hand. it's the easiest way for me to keep track of everything that's going on and also it's what i'm used to and don't feel like changing

also i still use amk from the command line deal with it
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It's not much of a problem to port form MIDI, it's just a matter of how and what you do.

If I find a MIDI missing channels, I find another midi and try to merge them together into one or just put it in myself.

If one just sounds horrible, I just do work on it to make it sound better.

Some work can make anything sound good.



it's not always fun tho so I have a bunch of abandoned ports on my desktop
If I use a midi it ends up regurgitated from OpenMPT.
PetiteMM has been VERY good with the MML representation (it ends up quantized through the tracker.) The primary issue I see is that it's more difficult to optimize due to lower readability.

Since I'm very slack about optimization PetiteMM is a handy convenience tool, many of my .IT file drafts end up sounding better through the SPC700 after panning, echoing, mixing, etc. I spend a lot of time making samples and the last thing I want is to rewrite music, especially something that's not going to be put into a hack.
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Originally posted by musicalman
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If I have to sum this whole post up, I think the main question I'm driving at is, am I stubbornly sticking to my comfort zone and holding myself back, or is it more of a personal preference which is just another way to work? I know only I can answer that for myself, but I feel like I need more perspective from people who work in different ways. I'm not ranking or ignoring anyone though, so I'm all ears!

I think, ultimately, it depends on how much time you're willing to spend. I'd suggest trying a midi->mml converter again as it should expedite workflow. Maybe save the hand crafted MMLs for more virtuous projects.
I think it's easier if I use the piano roll first to make a MIDI, then port it over with PetiteMM. The .txt files (while I can understand it) is harder to go by to me. Although I never actually tried it myself, I can imagine it being harder since I'd have to be counting how many times a note plays without even hearing it in the .txt file. It could potentially lead to more desyncs too.
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