Garry's Mod doesn't make playing MIDI music very easy. I've made a MIDI player, but I couldn't release it in its current state. The Source engine has some very annoying, completely unnecessary limitations on how far (and precise) you can pitch shift a sound, so as a result, I need a custom-tooled soundfont before I can release it. You can listen to how my MIDI player sounds with the Arachno soundfont here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q1eUga374I&t=8s

You may notice some notes don't play at all, while Source complains about pitches being out of range.

dont forget that you can just set the range to how far a pc can count, problem is that as soon as you bust that it will go into the negative...

and I would just use the default soundfont of doom

Internally, Source converts both the volume and pitch to 1 byte unsigned integers at some point before reaching the sound mixer code. Because of this, the game has an additional check to make sure you don't pass a pitch value above 255. if you do, it will just refuse to play the sound. Most good audio mixers use floating point numbers for both all the way through, so this is just a pointless engine limitation that can't be worked around without a very hacky binary module, which would make it not workshop compatible. Or Facepunch Studios could change it, but I doubt they would, due to how much it would break compatability with existing addons.

Doom doesn't really have a "default soundfont". The original DOS release could use General MIDI, which would just use whatever soundfont your soundcard had in it's ROM (or on a modern OS, the default MIDI device, which is typically a soundfont provided by the OS), or it could use AdLib, which was a specific old sound card feature for synthesizing audio. Neither of these is a viable option in gmod, so I must supply a soundfont with the MIDI player.

If you are interested in the midi player, you can currently download it from the gmod workshop. I have yet to integrate it with gmDoom Maps, though.

Thanks for the info! We'll probably give it a try sometime.

Originally posted by Jcw87:

Internally, Source converts both the volume and pitch to 1 byte unsigned integers at some point before reaching the sound mixer code. Because of this, the game has an additional check to make sure you don't pass a pitch value above 255. if you do, it will just refuse to play the sound. Most good audio mixers use floating point numbers for both all the way through, so this is just a pointless engine limitation that can't be worked around without a very hacky binary module, which would make it not workshop compatible. Or Facepunch Studios could change it, but I doubt they would, due to how much it would break compatability with existing addons.

Doom doesn't really have a "default soundfont". The original DOS release could use General MIDI, which would just use whatever soundfont your soundcard had in it's ROM (or on a modern OS, the default MIDI device, which is typically a soundfont provided by the OS), or it could use AdLib, which was a specific old sound card feature for synthesizing audio. Neither of these is a viable option in gmod, so I must supply a soundfont with the MIDI player.

If you are interested in the midi player, you can currently download it from the gmod workshop. I have yet to integrate it with gmDoom Maps, though.

I was actually talking about ripping the soundfont...

Originally posted by Pootis137:

I was actually talking about ripping the soundfont...

I know exactly what you were talking about, but there isn't a soundfont in Doom. Doom has never had a soundfont packaged with it. It has always relied on the sound card or the OS supplying a soundfont.

It doesn't really matter though, as I've already picked out a soundfont.

I really like that you go through such lenghts just to make it authentic, but the easiest approach would be just to play the full songs in the background.
Good job actually doing this.

It's less about making it authentic, and more about avoiding copyright issues. Supplying mp3s of the music would be easier, but it is also copyright infringement. Playing the original MIDI data from user-supplied WADs is more difficult, but it would not be copyright infringement.

you know that this is modding, and therefore you cannot infringe any copyrights?

That is objectively wrong.

why? you are not making money of this, are you? you are modifying a game, aren't you?

Copyright law only has a few exceptions, one of which is 'fair use'. To argue fair use, this would need to be educational or transformative, and neither applies here.

and how am I allowed to add, for instance dr dre - the next episode? look it up, it's on the workshop! there are many songs with copyrights on this platform...

And they are all copyright infringing. The only reason they aren't taken down is because they are too obscure for the companies owning the copyright to care about it.