MIDI used in modern games?

Hey all, I was just wondering if anyone knows about any current games in the last 6 or 7 years that either uses, or emulates MIDI.

I'm sure it's based purely on nostalgia and an impressionable young age, but every game that had MIDI music has been so ingrained into my memory, It's like pure joy flooding into my lizard brain. I'm curious, only because I can't remember a single games soundtrack post MIDI, and that saddens me.

Some examples would be Ultima, Syndicate, Doom, Space Quest. Yeah I know, I'm an old bastard, lol. I think the one and only exception to this would be Diablo 2 and Tristram. That too has a slight MIDI sound to it, imo.

Yeah, just super curious, and would love to check out some games using this style, if they do in fact exist!

Thanks in advance, Duders.

The Steam versions of FF7 and 8 uses MIDI I think. The PC version of those were never as good as on PS1 but they didn't fix it even in the HD release.

I wouldn't have thought so, but I could be wrong. A MIDI soundtrack (GM or XG strictly speaking) was a convenient way to have music in a time when storage limits, bus bandwidths and so on made streaming good quality digital audio impractical. A MIDI soundtrack only has to contain note data rather than the sounds themselves, with the hardware being responsible for producing actual sound from that data, so it's a lot less information to have to store, stream etc. Now that those limits have gone away I can't think of a good reason why anyone would anyone would use MIDI in that way. If you wanted to make a soundtrack that evoked the same sounds of that era you'd just sequence it and record the result as an audio file. Maybe there are games that try to emulate those old soundtracks in a similar way to that, but chip-tune stuff seems to have had much more of a retro appeal so far. The GM or XG stuff could be pretty, err.. cheesy to be honest, but I guess that's just me. Reminds me too much of dodgy home keyboards.

MIDI is too dependent either to hardware or software emulation to be used these days. It is possible that consoles do not have native MIDI support and some USB PC audio interfaces don't have that either.

Most like to the "midi sounding" music these days is tracker music. Tracker music is super useful for games because is just note data and samples - giving it better sound than MIDI, it does not eat that much memory (as something like MP3 or wav), but it also has ability change things like tempo, pitch, channel volume, song patterns etc. while game is running.

Wow, I had no idea my question was so involved. I semi knew that it was hardware dependent, just not to that degree. That totally makes sense that it stopped being used because of both tech advances, and practicality. I figured with all of these retro games that we've had as of late, some of them might have prerecorded MIDI into an mp3 file. Or something that evokes that style.

I'm not going to lie, most of the terminology on the Tracker Music page is pretty foreign to me. However, I think I'll dive a little more into it so I can get a better grasp on what's going on behind the scenes.
I look forward to learning more, thanks!

@charlie_victor_bravo: That screenshot... Thanks for the blast from the past, dude! I used to mess around with FT2 on my old DOS PC as a kid for so many hours on end. Damn shame I lost pretty much all of the mods I made to time and failing harddrives. Modern sequencing software and VST plugins are fine and all, but there's something special about an 8-track mod tune made with crunchy 8-bit mono samples.

edit: And yes, editing the FX columns and such is what taught me how to read hex numbers :-)

Ultima 7 still has great music! Loved Stones!

@m16mojo2: If you want to dive a bit into "tracking" just download a tracker. OpenMPT is free and has almost everything that you want (including midi synth and midi in/out options). Making samples and turning them into instruments can be bit confusing at first - so it is recommended that you download some songs (or instruments) and play with those to get the general idea.

If you can run homebrew on the Nintendo DS, NitroTracker is great oldschool-like tracker and you can sample easily with DS's inbuilt microphone.

@colony024: True that. Looking at those channel amplitude waves bouncing while patterns scroll vertically in the FT2 was something special back in the day.

This ^. A soundtrack that can sound significantly different based on the hardware or software playing it is bad. MIDI for video game music made sense in a time where there were strict size limitations on games (because you're just storing instructions to play sound and not the sound itself). It doesn't make sense in the modern era where there's ample room to store the audio directly.

The old PC versions used MIDI, the new re-release was re-written to use MP3s indeed because MIDI support is so spotty on modern PCs.

Also they did fix the problem with the quality. The problem with the original version of the PC re-release was that what they used to make the MP3s was basically a recording of the original PC MIDI soundtrack playing through a rather poor sounding generic MIDI synth. However, because they were MP3 files (they weren't even packed into a content container - there was just a folder with the raw MP3s in it) they were trivial to replace with whatever you wanted. Many people just replaced them with MP3s of the PS1 version soundtrack. Eventually Square made that fan fix official, replacing the MP3s with recordings based on the PS1 version - so the music is exactly the same as the PS1 now.

I believe a few recent games have used MIDI in combination with soundfonts or emulated synthesizers, but it's generally an overcomplicated way to achieve the same thing that has been possible with the aforementioned tracker formats for decades, and I believe both VST instruments and soundfonts have some license fees attached (Steinberg owns VST and E-Mu/Creative owns SoundFont).

Only games I can remember off the top of my head that uses soundfonts right now were the Empire Earth games, but I'm pretty sure I saw some .sf2 files in a game released within the last 3 years too.

I mean... Basically all recorded music from at least the past decade has MIDI used on it at some point in the process.

(I know what you mean, I'm being pedantic. I just get the feeling that a lot of people think that MIDI is a method of sound generation rather than a widely used method of controlling sound.)

Also, MIDI is used for plenty of non-sound-related things too! For instance, Rock Band tracks are stored in MIDI format. Camera moves, lighting, lipsync, the playable notes on track, basically everything except the actual sound files themselves are run by MIDI. Additionally, Valve uses MIDI with Dota 2 to control the stage projection system at The International (https://youtu.be/2JVzppl1SA8?t=53s).

Yeah, MIDI has been used for stage lighting and such stuff for decades, makes it easy to sync lights with the same MIDI clock as the synthesizers on stage and such.

On that note, one of the earliest network multiplayer deathmatch games used MIDI for the networking aspect, MIDI Maze.

If we want to get technical, MIDI stands for "Musical Instrument Digital Interface". It's a protocol for transferring data. Often musical data. It's kind of like sheet music turned into a stream of numbers. MIDI itself makes no sound. To get sound from it, you use MIDI data to trigger either a musical instrument that accepts MIDI input, or a wave table, which is a collection of sounds typically designed to imitate real instruments.

It was used in games because of limited storage space and computing power. Raw audio files take up a lot of memory. Old consoles and computers didn't have a whole lot of memory. Playing those same files takes a lot of computing power. If you want decent sounding audio, you need something spitting out samples at 44.1 kHz. That's 735 times faster than 60 Hz: your typical frame rate.

MIDI data takes up much less space because it's not raw audio. It doesn't handle every sample of 44.1 kHz audio. Instead, it just handles things like note starting and stopping times, dynamics and tempos. Alongside much smaller file sizes, you also don't have to process stuff at 44.1 kHz anymore, you only need to process stuff at whatever your smallest note duration is saving immense amount of computer power. At least immense amounts back in the 80s-90s. Nowadays it's nothing to run some 44.1 kHz audio alongside your game play.

The MIDI 'music' you're nostalgic about is really just the sounds from the wave tables they used in those days. We don't use them much anymore because honestly, better stuff has come around in the meantime. Well, different stuff. Who's to say what's 'better'? I mean, analog synths are making a huge comeback these days. Interesting tidbit: Roland, responsible for some very quality analog synths way back in the day said (probably sometime in the 80s) that they were going completely digital and would never look back. Well, they released their first analog synth in decades a couple years back. Audio trends change all the time. Before you know it, those sounds you're nostalgic for will be fashionable again.

Yeah, while the OP isn't specific about what kind of "MIDI sound" he's nostalgic for, but since he's talking old PC games it's fairly likely he's thinking of the Adlib OPL2 card, using a Yamaha FM synthesizer chip. If that's the case he may be in luck since FM synthesis seems to be making a comeback this year, Korg have released their Volca FM which is compatible with the classic Yamaha DX7 (which was fairly similar to the Adlib sound card, as well as the Genesis sound chip, both manufactured by Yamaha), and Yamaha themselves have re-released a smaller model of the DX7 as the Yamaha Reface DX. If it gets popular enough, I wouldn't be surprised if we start hearing FM synthesizers in more game music again.