Bug #1055
[Mac OS X] Missing MIDI instruments
Description
System: Mac mini Late 2009
OS: 10.7.4
A lot of music tracks suffer from missing instruments. For example Doom 2 map 1 lacks the main organ. For testing purposes I removed the Doomsday folder within Application support and tried out 1.9.7, 1.9.8(32 and 64 bit) and the latest beta of 1.9.9. Result is always the same. I used the fmod plugin, but it also occurs using the sdl plugin.
Labels: Music
History
#1
Updated by skyjake over 12 years ago
Updated by I can hear this, too, but I'm not sure whether it's due to the DLS sample bank in Lion or because of some bug in the MUS-to-MIDI conversion.
#2
Updated by skyjake over 12 years ago
After some investigation this seems like a problem with the DLS used on Lion.
The MUS-to-MIDI conversion is working correctly: identical MIDI files are generated both on Windows and Mac OS X.
When using Windows's gm.dls as the "music-soundfont" on Mac OS X, the music plays correctly.
So the solution is to either use another DLS soundfont or one of the high-quality music resource packs.
#3
Updated by amanojyakux over 12 years ago
Updated by Thanks for looking into this. You mentioned changing the default sound bank.
How did you do this? The only way I could think of is replacing the dls bank inside of the coreaudio component with the dls shipped with Windows. While this does indeed makes the music within Doomsday sound fine again, all other applications that use midi music (Boxer, Dosbox, PrBoom+ etc.) become dead silent. Or is there a way to point to a different sound bank within Doosmday?
#4
Updated by skyjake over 12 years ago
You can change the sound bank used by Doomsday by setting the cvar "music-soundfont". It needs the full path of a .dls file, e.g.:
music-soundfont /Users/username/Documents/example.dls
I did some more checking with the gs_instruments.dls files from OS X 10.5 and 10.6, and the music does not work correctly with those either. So it looks like Doomsday can only generate MIDI music that works with the Windows gm.dls.
Rather than spend hours trying to tweak the MIDI output to match OS X's gs_instruments, I'm going to look into FluidSynth integration so that we can use SF2 soundfonts for much improved music output.