Make EQ's music (MIDI) sound Significantly Better.

[bivouac]

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

The only major downside is that any global .xmi (gl.xmi) music, with the exception of combattheme1/2 and deaththeme, will still rely on MIDI playback since there are no EMTs associated with them.

I managed to work around this somewhat. This fix involves modifying eqgame.exe, which may get your account banned on a server you do not own.

I opened eqgame.exe in Notepad and Ctrl+F searched to find gl.xmi, then changed it to gl.mp3. As far as I know, Titanium only references gl.xmi at bankers, merchants, and class trainers. I settled for using the banker/merchant music as "gl.mp3" since I assume mp3s can't have multiple tracks like an XMI. It worked as expected on a local eqemu server.

[evogelion]

Thanks for all the hard work put into this and I'll be watching the progress at the edge of my seat for future developments.

The amount of talent that goes into all these mods is mind blowing.

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

T It would be great if a package like this were to eventually be added to the official P99 file distribution.

Yeah since this was a classic experience that many of us had back in the day.

[AbstractVision]

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

Thanks for sharing a way to hear this music as it was meant to sound! I enjoyed it in P99 for a while, but I had to stop using it after I ran into some technical issues between VirtualMIDISynth and other games.

In December, I read someone's post on the P99 reddit about adding new music into Kunark zones using a tool to convert the sound trigger files into the newer, less cryptic, EMT format. Since then, I've done a similar conversion for all Trilogy zones with Maestrobob's mp3 transfers instead.

TrilogyEMT v0.1

The install is detailed in the readme, but it's basically drag-and-drop into your EQ folder. The EMT conversions aren't perfect and there's more I hope to add to them. Please share any feedback if you try it out.

I wish you posted this as its own thread, I have had nothing but trouble trying to get music working in P99 with several different MIDI programs... and I install this and BAM everything works better than it ever has. There is music changing in cities... vendor music, bank music, guild music, arena music, login music, etc As the legendary scoundrel Todd Howard once said "It just works.". Thank you for this and seriously make it its own thread, people are still looking at the original post in this thread that hasn't been updated since 2012 and its breaking music in game.

[Jazzi]

Just thought I would add to first post, If you use synthusr.sf2 from an original Everquest Trilogy install it sounds pretty much 100% perfect, Not sure why with titanium synthusr.sf2 some of the Qeynos audio is not perfect guess next step is check other towns anyway give it a go and see if any of you guys notice the difference.

[Maestrobob]

Very interesting... I wouldn't have expected opening the game binary in notepad would've revealed specific filenames. I loaded eqgame.exe into HxD and saw a ton of strings and direct filename calls, including some Miles SS stuff.

Makes me think it could be possible to hack the executable enough to fix the gl music triggers. That's a little above me, so maybe someone with more experience could give their opinion. It really sucks that so many of the gl subtracks were disabled - having the swimming music, sneak music, all 3 battle songs, and the string/wind/brass/percussion bard instrument queues back would be fantastic.

[void221]

About this TrilogyEMT v0.1 ...

i installed first this Coolsoft MIDI Mapper and this OmniMidi .. the music was really better , but i also got some game crashes so i deinstalled these 2 programs again and installed this mp3-variant TrilogyEMT.

i played now not much but i run to any places in freeport with new music for testing.
everthing works fine and i have got no game crashes ... tomorrow i will play all day long and keep an eye on this.

thank you for your work , this makes the game really better.

[krozar]

For those on a Linux distro (never could get Directmusic working for me in WINE) there's fluidsynth and it has a GUI front-end called qsynth. i would expect most package managers to have these. Arch has them on pacman and according to the wiki ubuntu and its forks have it as well on apt.

No need to have a GUI open for MIDI support. Fluidsynth is a command line application and as such can be run in the background.

Here is the command I run:

fluidsynth -a pulseaudio -m alsa_seq -i -C off -R off -g 0.3 -s /usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.sf2 &> /dev/null &

A breakdown of the options and arguments I use:
-a, audio driver (you can use pulseaudio or alsa here. I prefer pulse whenever possible as alsa can hog the sound card)
-m, midi driver
-i, suppresses the fluidsynth shell
-C, chorus (personal preference to: off)
-R, reverb (personal preference once again)
-g, gain (0 - 5 x.1 float, defaults to 0.2)
-s, server mode (doesn't seem to run its own service, just keeps it running if the fluidsynth shell is closed)
/usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.sf2, replace this with your preferred soundfont.
&> /dev/null suppresses all output
& runs it as a background process (note, if you close the terminal window it will terminate all BG processes associated with that session)

You can place it in a shell script that you may already be using to start the Titanium client or if you use Lutris you can have it start a script with that command. Select your EQ installation in Lutris, go to options, under the system options tab there's a field for pre-launch script.

I tried to run this as a Systemd service, but I'm having issues getting pulse and alsa to agree running fluidsynth as root. You can try it with a Type=simple service file and load it on command with systemd start fluidsynth. However I would expect more issues trying to get this to run automatically at boot since audio tends to start with the user login and doesn't like switching users, even to root. But for me the background process works nicely.

[f4k3n4m3]

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

For those on a Linux distro (never could get Directmusic working for me in WINE) there's fluidsynth and it has a GUI front-end called qsynth. i would expect most package managers to have these. Arch has them on pacman and according to the wiki ubuntu and its forks have it as well on apt.

No need to have a GUI open for MIDI support. Fluidsynth is a command line application and as such can be run in the background.

Here is the command I run:

fluidsynth -a pulseaudio -m alsa_seq -i -C off -R off -g 0.3 -s /usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.sf2 &> /dev/null &

A breakdown of the options and arguments I use:
-a, audio driver (you can use pulseaudio or alsa here. I prefer pulse whenever possible as alsa can hog the sound card)
-m, midi driver
-i, suppresses the fluidsynth shell
-C, chorus (personal preference to: off)
-R, reverb (personal preference once again)
-g, gain (0 - 5 x.1 float, defaults to 0.2)
-s, server mode (doesn't seem to run its own service, just keeps it running if the fluidsynth shell is closed)
/usr/share/soundfonts/FluidR3_GM.sf2, replace this with your preferred soundfont.
&> /dev/null suppresses all output
& runs it as a background process (note, if you close the terminal window it will terminate all BG processes associated with that session)

You can place it in a shell script that you may already be using to start the Titanium client or if you use Lutris you can have it start a script with that command. Select your EQ installation in Lutris, go to options, under the system options tab there's a field for pre-launch script.

I tried to run this as a Systemd service, but I'm having issues getting pulse and alsa to agree running fluidsynth as root. You can try it with a Type=simple service file and load it on command with systemd start fluidsynth. However I would expect more issues trying to get this to run automatically at boot since audio tends to start with the user login and doesn't like switching users, even to root. But for me the background process works nicely.

For anyone having issues with music on Linux, you want to replace the FluidR3_GM.sf2 from the guides for linux and use one of the .sf2 from this thread.
Synthusr-samplefix is night and day different from FluidR3. FluidR3 might be good for general purpose, but it mangles EQ midis.

[starkind]

Full Playlist on a Roland
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...vcnNql5xHsyVq1

Sounds magical.

Going to see if there's a Roland emulator or soundfont out there.



Something horrificly wrong under windows 11 alienware default configs, there's a horrible ringing during combat music.

[krozar]

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

Full Playlist on a Roland

Sounds magical.

Going to see if there's a Roland emulator or soundfont out there.

Something horrificly wrong under windows 11 alienware default configs, there's a horrible ringing during combat music.

Nothing better than a Roland back in the 90s. I later realized how much I was missing out by not having one.

Plugged 'soundfont' into all Arch packages (including the Arch User Repo) and got some results but nothing regarding Roland specifically. (Likely a copyright issue)

 talzahr  arch  ~/build/fluidsynth  pikaur -Ss soundfont

Searching... [---]###
extra/fluidsynth 2.2.3-1 (pro-audio) [installed]
    A real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications
community/fluajho 1.6.2-3 (pro-audio)
    A simple sf2 soundfont host/player
community/freepats-general-midi 20210329-1 (soundfonts)
    Free and Open general MIDI sound set
community/liquidsfz 0.2.3-1 (lv2-plugins pro-audio)
    SFZ Sampler
community/polyphone 2.2.0-2 (pro-audio)
    A soundfont editor for quickly designing musical instruments
community/sfizz 1.1.1-1 (lv2-plugins pro-audio vst3-plugins)
    SFZ library and LV2 plugin
community/soundfont-fluid 3.1-3 [installed]
    FluidR3 soundfont
community/timidity++ 2.15.0-5 (pro-audio)
    A MIDI to WAVE converter and player
multilib/lib32-fluidsynth 2.2.3-1
    A real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications
aur/soundfont-unison 1.00-3 (33, 0.17)
    A lean and clean GM/GS soundbank
aur/soundfont-sgm 2.01-1 (20, 0.18)
    A balanced, good quality GM soundbank
aur/soundfont-titanic 1.2-3 (13, 0.19)
    A public domain, high quality MIDI soundfont by Luke Sena
aur/soundfont-generaluser 1.471-1 (12, 0.19)
    A small and well balanced GM/GS soundbank for many styles of music.
aur/soundfont-zelda3sf2 20040819-1 (8, 0.00)
    Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past soundfont for MIDI playback
aur/soundfont-zeldamcsf2 20050118-1 (8, 0.00)
    Legend of Zelda: Minish Cap soundfont for MIDI playback
aur/soundfont-fatboy 0.790-1 (6, 0.02)
    A free GM/GS SoundFont for classic video game MIDI, emulation, and general usage
aur/soundfont-arachno 1.0-1 (4, 0.17)
    GM/GS soundbank courtesy of Maxime Abbey.
aur/soundfont-sso-sf2 1.0-1 (4, 0.02)
    The Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra by Mattias Westlund. (SF2 format)
aur/fluidsynth-git 1.1.8.r868.e485129-1 (4, 0.00)
    A real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications (development version)
aur/freepats-ydp-grand-piano 20160804-1 (2, 0.46)
    Yamaha Disklavier Pro grand piano sf2 SoundFont
aur/soundfont-opl3-fm-128m 1.0-1 (3, 0.00)
    A SoundFont designed to simulate the classic MIDI sound of the Sound Blaster 16 (and other YM262 enabled hardware).
aur/soundfont-toh 3.4-1 (3, 0.00)
    Don Allen's Timbres of Heaven soundfont
aur/polyphone-git 2.2.0.r98.5d9179b6-1 (1, 0.95)
    A soundfont editor for quickly designing musical instruments
aur/swami 2.2.1-1 (2, 0.00)
    A SoundFont editor
aur/konfyt-git r181.81b5295-1 (2, 0.00)
    A digital keyboard workstation - search for SFZs/soundfonts, create layered patches on the fly, and more
aur/fluidplug-git r36.889b256-1 (2, 0.00)
    SoundFonts as LV2 plugins via FluidSynth
aur/fluida.lv2 0.7-2 (1, 0.10)
    An LV2 plugin which wraps the fluidsynth SF2 soundfont player
aur/soundfonts-aur-meta 0.0.1-1 (1, 0.00)
    Installs all the soundfont packages in the AUR
aur/fluidsynth-dssi 1.0.0-1 (0, 0.00)
    A FluidSynth soundfont-playing plugin
aur/mingw-w64-fluidsynth 2.2.3-1 (0, 0.00)
    A real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications (mingw-w64)
aur/mingw-w64-fluidsynth-bin 2.1.2-1 (0, 0.00)
    A real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications (mingw-w64)
aur/sfarklib-git 20200903-2 (0, 0.00)
    Library for decompressing sfArk soundfonts.
aur/soundfont-jeux 2.4-4 (0, 0.00)
    Jeux organ soundfont
aur/soundfont-personalcopy 5.1f-1 (0, 0.00)
    A large free SoundFont.
aur/soundfont-realfont 2.3-1 (0, 0.00)
    GM soundbank by Michel Villeneuve.
aur/soundfont-sunshine-perc 1-1 (0, 0.00)
    Five drum/percussion soundfonts from Sunshine Studios. Non-commercial use only.

soundfont-opl3-fm-128m package looks interesting: "A SoundFont designed to simulate the classic MIDI sound of the Sound Blaster 16 (and other YM262 enabled hardware)."

soundfonts-aur-meta has all soundfonts on the AUR in one package.

AUR packages will simply download them from a source that's defined in the PKGBUILD script, so they can be utilized by Windows users as well. The AUR meta package above simply lists the other soudnfont packages in the depends array. The soundfont-opl3-fm-128m package calls a source url: https://musical-artifacts.com/artifa...-3_FM_128M.zip (the raw PKGBUILD script)

Also, Fluidsynth has a Windows10 build on their Github repo.

I've started doing some P99 EverQuest videos on Youtube, so I'll test some of the soundfonts out and provide a good solution for Windows and Linux users alike. Also the Linux wiki page needs some serious updating so I will work on that as well. Everyone deserves good music without the strange looping sounds. *EDIT: I may even make a build of the qsynth qt GUI front-end for Windows. Presently it's only released for UNIX(like) environments. Since it interfaces directly with fluidsynth, it should be relatively quick to do (famous last words).