Dev Teelucksingh wrote:
>I have a Creative Labs Soundblaster 16 SCSI-2 card and I use two DOS
>MIDI players which work fine :
>
>Megamid v1.66 http://freeweb.digiweb.com/music/megamiddos/
> Graphical MIDI Player for DOS. Also supports playing of Karaoke MIDI files
quote from the documentation
-- I'VE GOT A SOUND BLASTER PRO/16 AND I DON'T HEAR ANYTHING! --
Of course! The plain vanilla SB Pro/16 you buy off the shelf only has a
FM chip (Yamaha OPL-2 or OPL-3) for making music, and MegaMID does not
support that. To get any sound out of your SB Pro/16, you'll need to
either :
* Connect some sort of external MIDI equipment via your SB's joystick port,
like a music keyboard or synthesizer (with MIDI)
* If you have a SB 16 with a WaveBlaster connector, you can get a wavetable
daughterboard card
* Buy a new sound card
-- WILL THERE BE SUPPORT FOR THE FM CHIP ? --
Probably not.
I've tried... it's too much trouble and it sounds pretty bad.
With wavetable cards getting more popular and old FM-based cards
getting obsolete, it's probably not worth the trouble to do it.
People with FM cards who are serious about their music should upgrade
to a wavetable card.
end of quote
>GSPLAY v1.1
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/music/gsplay1.zip
> A freeware MIDI player. Can also play Karaoke MIDI files.
Sorry to disapoint you but this program doesn't work with a SB16.
Of course it can *view* kareoke files - but that isn't very helpful since
the point with .kar files are that you can sing along with the music. ;)
>Obviously FM synthesis leaves much to be desired so I upgraded the card
>with an Ensoniq Daughterboard (similiar to a WaveBlaster addon board
>but cheaper at the time)
You can't claim that any SB16 works if you have bought extra equipment for
yours.
I've tried most of the programs that exist that claim to work and only two
really work. The first one is called play.exe and came with my SB16, the
other is Cubic Player (which I didn't even know could play MIDIs up until a
few days ago).
I really can't see why all the people that have made midi and/or kareoke
players assume that a daughterboard or extra chip is a standard
configuration. No matter how crappy it sounds SB16 is still the de facto
standard amoung soundcards.
Thankfully we have moved on from beeper -> Adlib -> SB -> SB16. And my bet
is that Creative environmental audio (used in SB Live cards) or Aureal 3D
(open standard - so more cards exist that use it, but no DirectX support is
planned from M$) will be the new standard in a "few" (5 or so) years.
When I tried Cubic Player I must say that some MIDIs sounded much better
(ex. USSR national song, pink panther theme) but some sounded terrible (ex.
Star Wars theme). All comparsions with play.exe of course.
BTW: Another usefull thing I noticed that Cubic Player haev is the fact
that it can see files that are packed and unpack them for playing.
