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We've all been there. Trying out some boffo new game and just being so green and jealous of the awesome music in it.

Well if you didn't know I'm actually pretty good at music and writing custom database software. How will this help you ? If you or someone can point me or direct me to a utility that can take MIDI and break it out to a text file, I will definitely see myself to making everyone a utility that can take this raw MIDI .TXT file and convert it straight to binary import MUSIC for Pico-8.

They both share similar methods of playback. MIDI uses onboard instruments to play their notes and PICO uses the same, but with a rather conservative list of instruments - a conversion could be and can be made.

And no, I'm no slouch at this sort of thing. Years ago there was a company called "American Church Lists."

My job there was to write a database that would keep track of all the churches in the world. The data they had stored originally was a real hectic mess. I was to write a program to organize that data and put it in a neat format where it could be easily output on the printer and used for mailing out religion-based advertisements.

So ... help me find (I know it's out there) that nice utility to convert any .MID to a .TXT file and I'll write a program to convert that for direct PICO playing. I know I can do this, I've seen the SOUND and MUSIC format of PICO. It's not so bad if you look just at the straight hexadecimal data.

And something we do NOT have lacking in the world is MIDI music. Myself alone I know I have pretty close to 11,000 if you add up all the ones from my MIDI directories that are ripped from video games, cartoon/anime themes, show tunes, movie tunes, the legendary music of Final Fantasy, everything from Squaresoft, every possible gaming platform, and other original tunes, I think you can see we will never run out of good music - ever.

And I'd like to help in that ...

P#55753 2018-08-26 20:59 ( Edited 2018-08-28 04:09)

I believe we have two of these already. So if you would like to take a look i'm sure you can find something of use in one of these two?

Located here:
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=28792

and here:

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=27673

P#55757 2018-08-26 22:43 ( Edited 2018-08-27 02:43)

Well they say great minds run in the same channel ...

But my question is, is it EASY to use ? That's the perfect reason I wrote my compressor was because people were having technical difficulties (likely complexity) in ZEP's own data compressor. Mine is just fire and forget ... and you get a nice piece of source-code stuffed in the clipboard to add to your code to cover the compressed data.

I'll check these out - on the morrow. It's meds now and bed.

Thanks for refreshing my memory though, CD.

I see I even wrote a comment on one of them and I don't even remember it ... ∙∙∙ brain wandering

I may still wind up writing one by hunting down the MIDI to text tool. Will see how easy and effective the existing ones are for some simple MIDI I have.

P#55758 2018-08-26 23:07 ( Edited 2018-08-27 03:12)

I figured you'd want to roll your own either way. ;D

But I thought these might just save you some trouble along the way, definitely not meant to dissuade you in a manner, not that I believe I could. xD

Just cause one exists doesn't mean that another can't. That's the glory and nitemare of software. Options for everyone! Good luck digging through them all!

Also I couldn't tell you how easy or accessible they are as I haven't tried either of em out. Though I definitely see the utility in such a thing, just haven't gotten any projects to the point where I needed to add music, which should say something considering most of the time I like to start with music and build around it. Other people's music I should add, I ain't got a musical bone in my body.

P#55769 2018-08-27 10:04 ( Edited 2018-08-27 18:50)

Hmm ... --scratching chin-- I had forgotten about the limited space available for music, 64 pages.

I managed to get kittenm4ster's encoder to function. Watching it, yeah, that's a lot of work, and it cuts off the music if its really long.

There was something else I was experimenting with that should help others. But I think I need to do some deep research into PICO's music format, especially regarding polyphonic notes before I get too far.

Thanks for the links ! Good stuff.

P#55790 2018-08-27 20:26 ( Edited 2018-08-28 00:26)

yup yup glhf, tho I don't see why 64 pages would be a hard limit, i seems perfectly reasonable to be able to json encode or similar song data and load it in dynamically into available pages that aren't currently being used. So basically having a "read" and a "write" section of pages and flip floppin em while loading in data as needed. That method also means theoretically you could compress the data as well if needed.

Idk, all food for thought. I dunno much about music nor how pico-8 handles it. I just know that in the end it's all data, and I know how to handle data, lmao.

P#55797 2018-08-28 00:09 ( Edited 2018-08-28 04:09)

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