A discussion on restoring EQ's music once and for all

[Insedeel]

Originally Posted by Korthal [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Has anyone had any success with restoring the original music? This thread seems to have died without any resolution.

I have the entire list of eq midis through velious.. Not sure how to get these posted on the web tho for download. They're in the original midi format though so someone would need to go through and rerecord them into mp3 format for use in the titanium client.

[Korthal]

Originally Posted by Insedeel [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I have the entire list of eq midis through velious.. Not sure how to get these posted on the web tho for download. They're in the original midi format though so someone would need to go through and rerecord them into mp3 format for use in the titanium client.

Yeah I have all the original midis as well - I was more curious if anyone successfully remastered them into mp3s to make them sound more like they did back in 99.

There were some posts from a few people that were going to try using old hardware to reproduce the music - did anything come from that?

[Insedeel]

I'll mess around with some midi to mp3 converters when I have some time over the weekend here, and see if I can get a decent conversion done.

[mgellan]

Originally Posted by Korthal [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

There were some posts from a few people that were going to try using old hardware to reproduce the music - did anything come from that?

I actually installed the Classic CD on a P166 with Win98 and an AWE64 yesterday (being on holiday) ... and ran out of disk space. Damn, ain't that Classic. I'll drop a bigger IDE disk into the machine tonight as a secondary and install on that. I seem to have a LOT of IDE disks lying around since the world went SATA LOL.

I tried running Classic as a WINE app on LINUX but the client doesn't recognize WINE's DirectX9.0c driver as DirectX so it won't get past the EULA screen. Not that I expect to connect to anything but I wanted to see if the movie worked [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I did notice that when I installed on LINUX the MIDI (whatever) files are accompanied with SoundFont files, so I'll see if I can load them using the SoundBlaster utils that come with the cards to play the music, since actually being able to zone in to P99 with a Classic client is highly improbable!

Regards,
Mg

[doacleric]

Originally Posted by Korthal [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Yeah I have all the original midis as well - I was more curious if anyone successfully remastered them into mp3s to make them sound more like they did back in 99.

There were some posts from a few people that were going to try using old hardware to reproduce the music - did anything come from that?

http://www.xs4all.nl/~treesong/EQmp3.zip

These are about as close as we are going to get without someone running a classic client on a PC from the 1999-2000 era.
Btw, I made those mp3's about 6 years ago =)

[Tork]

Has anyone worked this to completion with original everything?

It continues to impress me how this community is able to forensically restore EQ to its glory days - it makes me want to sway a lighter in the air and sing-along with a Cinderella song.

[Overcast]

Originally Posted by doacleric [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

http://www.xs4all.nl/~treesong/EQmp3.zip

These are about as close as we are going to get without someone running a classic client on a PC from the 1999-2000 era.
Btw, I made those mp3's about 6 years ago =)

I still have the *original* EQ CD at home - if I install it - couldn't I get all the original MIDI files?

I'll do that for giggles, but I'm not sure offhand which files or file contains the music.

[mgellan]

Originally Posted by Overcast [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I still have the *original* EQ CD at home - if I install it - couldn't I get all the original MIDI files?

I think you can hear the original MIDI just by deleting the new MP3 files so the game plays the XMI (extended MIDI) files by default, but modern MIDI support provides very poor rendition compared to original Soundblaster AWE32 with the included Soundbank file. Thats what I'm trying to recreate!

FWIW I'm still struggling with noise on my AWE64 and reluctantly attributing it to the card itself. I may end up spending the $10 to buy an actual AWE32...

Regards,
Mg

[Melias]

Originally Posted by mgellan [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think you can hear the original MIDI just by deleting the new MP3 files so the game plays the XMI (extended MIDI) files by default, but modern MIDI support provides very poor rendition compared to original Soundblaster AWE32 with the included Soundbank file. Thats what I'm trying to recreate!

I believe this is correct as Cobalt Scar has no MP3 file, but it has the XMI and I still get that damn song playing when around the little bugger otters.

Incidentally, the Mayong Mistmoore fight in Demiplane of Blood has a different music for when fighting him contrary to the rest of the zone and that file is an MP3. However, it's in all likelyhood just the entire raid instance changing the regular MP3 to that one.

[Simplistik]

After 2 days of frustration trying to find all the different drivers I now have an old box Pentium 2 , with an Soundblaster 16 (isa) Windows 98SE installed on it anyone have any direction on what to do now to convert the MP3's over to midi?