Public Commander Keen Forum

Topic split from The Incredible Machine (TIM) 1992 music format - this thread's original post was initially published after this post by Malvineous. --Fleexy

Malvineous wrote: ↑Thu Sep 14, 2017 23:22[...] I've updated the VGMPF page, thanks!

Having a similary playback feature for our KeenWiki would be neat.

Unfortunately this isn't a playback feature, the songs have to be recorded and then the recordings uploaded, which takes up a fair bit of disk space. The VGMPF can do it because they're on an unlimited-storage hosting plan, but alas the KeenWiki isn't. (It used to be but I found the performance too poor and the outages too frequent.)

If you can find/create a web-based OPL synth that genuinely plays back the tiny IMF files live in the browser then that would be a much better proposition as it would take up next to no extra resources, and conceivably would make it practical to include playback of mod music as well as the official tracks.

Mmmhhh... I see.
Maybe @Fleexy has an idea/can help us out on that?

Unfortunately I also have limited storage, though I haven't even used 1 GB out of my 50. I'd be happy to store some stuff - how much space are we considering?

There's an IMF to WAV converter; could that be ported to JS?

Web based opl synthesizer? That would be hella nifty

Fleexy wrote: ↑Fri Oct 06, 2017 22:00 Unfortunately I also have limited storage, though I haven't even used 1 GB out of my 50. I'd be happy to store some stuff - how much space are we considering?

There's an IMF to WAV converter; could that be ported to JS?

talking about IMF files size of the whole Keen 4 soundtrack we can estimate: ~50kb.
The whole galaxy collection: ~260kb
converted into WAVE format, we are talking about: ~150MB
converted into OGG with an acceptable compression rate: ~15MB

http://www.shikadi.net/keenwiki/Keen_4_Music#Download

15 MB (or even 150 MB) is no problem. I'd be happy to unzip a package of the sounds somewhere publicly accessible, then the wiki can embed a player that accesses those files.

Malvineous wrote: ↑Fri Oct 06, 2017 14:00 [...] the songs have to be recorded and then the recordings uploaded, which takes up a fair bit of disk space. The VGMPF can do it because they're on an unlimited-storage hosting plan, but alas the KeenWiki isn't. [...]

Fleexy wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2017 20:52 15 MB (or even 150 MB) is no problem. I'd be happy to unzip a package of the sounds somewhere publicly accessible, then the wiki can embed a player that accesses those files.

So the next step would be to add a player feature to the wiki (@Malvineous). depending on the format compatibility I would then convert the tunes and sounds in question and hand them to @Fleexy.

Just bear in mind that good quality recordings already exist on the VGMPF: Keen 4 Keen 5 Keen 6.

The only way you could do better than this would be to record the files on actual OPL hardware with a Digisnap or similar, as those ones look like they were recorded with the Nuked OPL emulated synth.

Because I don't understand the least of the technicalities, this is just a shot in the dark: I remember that there is a AdPlug/Winamp binary, with AdPlug 2.2.1 core and OPL3 support. shouldn't this be somehow helpful in terms of the capability of decoding and playing IMF files?

other than that, these recordings are indeed good quality. but of course we have a couple of additional mod tracks In the conversion queue as well.

The AdPlug emulator is only an approximation, and until recently it was far from perfect, so for a long time playing IMF files sounded different to the way they do on a real PC. AdPlug uses the same emulator as DOSBox, and both of them by default play the songs back imperfectly.

For an example, play the Nuked recording from the VGMPF for "Please Don't Metal With Me!" and take note of the three-note sound effect at 0:18 (it's very quiet so listen carefully.) Then load Keen 6 and warp to level 6, and listen to the same song. 18 seconds in, that sound effect is completely different.

Now if you go into your DOSBox configuration file and find the "oplrate" option, and change it to 49716 (the actual rate of the original chip) then run Keen 6 again, that sound effect will change once more.

So because there are all these variations, recording one imperfect version over another is, in my opinion, of limited value. It would be much more useful to record the original chip, as the recording can then be used as a reference to compare the emulators against. That recording could then be used to help improve the accuracy of the emulators, and since not everyone has access to an original OPL chip, everyone can hear the way the song is "supposed" to sound.

Malvineous wrote: ↑Thu Nov 09, 2017 23:17It would be much more useful to record the original chip, as the recording can then be used as a reference to compare the emulators against. That recording could then be used to help improve the accuracy of the emulators, and since not everyone has access to an original OPL chip, everyone can hear the way the song is "supposed" to sound.

The only problem with that is that some sound cards used clone OPL chips, so the sound your OPL chip produces might not be exactly the same as the sound the composer was getting to hear while creating the song.

Very true, you'd have to do it on an original Yamaha chip. Luckily the clones are pretty easy to spot. Although if they are true clones (as in, the plans for the Yamaha chips were stolen) they should sound exactly the same...

No, what I meant was that the composer might or might not have used a Yamaha OPL chip in the first place. This makes it even less likely to record any OPL-based music the way it was "supposed" to sound, unless you can track down the composer and ask him/her what sound card was used.

Ah yes, if the composer was cheap and got an off-brand sound card then that may well be true! But I was thinking less about what the song is supposed to sound like and more about what the chip/emulator is supposed to sound like, for the sake of getting OPL emulation as accurate as possible.