[Official] Integrated Midi Support.

I went and checked the tool and indeed I still do not have any tools to compose for that obscure format worth a damn...on OSX.

Gimme midi and stop shoving me down a rabbit hole with no exit.

 

Game devs can be to game dev what a lot of gamers on popular games website forums are to games, and it's pretty frustrating. Midi was not invented by Creative for Lucasarts titles in the early 90s, it's a universally supported massively implemented (Truly massive scale) standard for controlling what can be somewhat ad hoc devices

Unity, as stated, is not a fps, mmo and flappy birds engine and its beauty in the age of Oculus Rift will be felt way beyond the world of fps, 'mmo' and flappy birds games, or 'games' as we know them at all. Midi is a pretty smart way of allowing it to control electronic devices that might be more familiar to electronics/hardware guys than Unity is and when you're planning to do a lot of things with these kind of guys, it's nice to know there's an amazingly featured media engine that they can work with. Or Unity can just be a small nothing in grand scheme of things where people meet up in the real world

 

I definitely want that type of stuff. It has its uses even in mainstream games. If I'm not mistaken that's what Nintendo used in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask for all the instruments, allowing them to be played in-game and affect the character animations. In Conker's Bad Fur Day, in the main menu the in-game band character playing instruments have all their animations synced to the music via midi. There are many practical use-cases...

 

Not to start an argument, but you could do that by not limiting yourself to a single platform. Out of every tracker I have tried only one of them, namely Renoise, supported OS X. There are more that support OS X, but OpenMPT had the most capabilities so I simply stopped digging around. Catch is it only supports Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker#List_of_music_trackers

 

I would love to see midi support, and if it's possible a tracker-like editor to allow composition in Unity to take advantage of the midi support. As others have said, tracker apps on OSX are really primitive. I think people would take advantage of the tracker format if there was a decent editor available. MIDI is pretty similar, and surely the Unity team could make a better editor than what exists for tracker composition!

 

Yeah..I went through that list and tried every one of them way back when Unity first announced tracker mods. BTW.. I don't like windoze and it don't like me. I am a technologist who designs and engineers huge digital installs,does R&D on and invents new products, owns a music studio and I am not a gamer so the tracker format is useless to me and my clients and R&D...And excuse me...what a stupid suggestion..go spend hundred to thousands on a computer to run a program whose output is useless to me in an OS environment I despise for always getting in my way or failing hard at critical moments..

Gimme midi and stop trying to shove me down a dead end rabbit hole.

 

Making a tracker app interface in Unity is a bad allocation of dev resources. MIDI OTOH is an excellent allocation of Unity dev resources. There are more than enough midi composers, files and et al, so that all Unity needs to do is give us a proper in depth scripting interface and a basic piano roll editor and support for sound fonts or playing samples. This stuff already exists in the wild for Unity..it just has to get integrated into it's core.

 

Working on G-Audio 1.3 these days, integrating sample based midi file playback as well as scala format support ( .scl ).

Should be out quite soon. Focus is more on generative music, but mapping channels and tracks of a midi file to G-Audio's sample banks and mixer tracks will be supported.

Cheers,

Gregzo

 

I wasn't suggesting spending hundreds to thousands on a computer solely for the purpose of running a single program. Given your stated qualifications you should have run into visualization in some form. Virtual Box is free and supports OS X.

OpenMPT has very low requirements. Some digging around on the Internet has led me to believe that it apparently supports Windows as far back as 95/NT. Shouldn't be too difficult to find a cheap copy of Windows floating around.

Though if you wanted to pay absolutely nothing, you could try a Linux distro and using Wine to run the program. Though your luck may vary as Wine's app entry is a bit out of date. It scored Silver in 2011.

 

Sorry but i think it's worth reading what ippdev is saying re. rabbit hole

Supporting a tracker format instead if implementing midi is ABSOLUTELY MINDLESS

It's like saying 'well we dont really want to support images but we'll give you .gif at least'

 

How many users are going to actually want MIDI music? I can understand the comment someone made earlier about MIDI hardware support for applications or games that might want to be built around that audience.

Actually using it for in-game music though tends to be a bad choice given that it is usually inconsistent across platforms unless the implementation comes with its own soundfont. Even with consistency guaranteed, it still tends to be sub-par compared to pretty much any other format.

Not that tracker guarantees quality, but it allows you to use your own samples and thus you can fine tune your music if you decide that a specific instrument simply isn't good enough. You can't really do that with MIDI.

Only up to a point. While his statements about restrictions can be valid, he has effectively dug his own rabbit hole by refusing to use additional platforms.

 

I'm confused, why can't you use your own samples with midi? You use software that can save a midi file, you have the midi data control a sample like any tracker would in an implementation that could be as customised or broad as you like

I've been using software that used midi as a primary data format and trackers to make music since the late 80s, the labelling midi as something that doesn't let you use your own samples is completely arbitrary, i think even a cludge handed programmer such as myself could understand FMOD enough to program an elementary implementation of sample playback and modulation that used midi to drive it.

And no not really, 'restricting' yourself to a platform should have nothing to do with a data format. No images but .gifs and sorry these .gifs only work on linux?

 

Nothing stopping you. Implementation depending it could even potentially be easy to do so. But if it isn't easy, why go through the hassle when you can simply use tracker formats?

Even better, some trackers like OpenMPT actually support importing MIDI files. You can import a MIDI, assign custom samples, make some tweaks, and export a tracker file.

File format was never the issue. His complaint was "... I still do not have any tools to compose for that obscure format worth a damn...on OSX". Which is what spawned this entire sub-conversation.

 

Thought this thread is about MIDI and not trackers. Trackers are a different approach for creating game music. Tracker where created for the Amiga in the first place and then used in the demo scene (but I'am not an computer historian) MIDI is an also (to be fair quite old) industry standard which is widely accepted.

I believe MIDI has some advantages:

From the Artist point of view:
- The musician or composer can create music in his/her beloved sequencer. No new tool to learn. (That's quite different from using tracker). Export the music to a midi file. Import it into Unity3d that's it, done. Simple straight forward.
- The musician can do live performances in real time over the network with midi, may be a virtual concert in a game. The instruments are plugged in to Unity3D and the avatar is rocking.

From the players point of view:
- He/she can interact with music change it on the fly or just try to play along. Or something completely different. That's also quite different from using a tracker or a predefined soundtrack. And that's what gaming is about. Not every game needs a trigger.

From the assets developers point of view:
- The developer gets an platform in depended and reliable low level interface. That allows the building of editor/in game extensions or other modules. Score or Note editor/display, piano role, in game piano keys strings (rock star) , sound-bank tools, synths. Tools for 2D and 3D. All the stuff which mades life easier.

I guess MIDI support will bring new and fresh ideas to Unity3D, cause that would allow musicians and composers to approach gaming in different way.

Best.

 

I have just found this:

http://cs.carleton.edu/cs_comps/1314/dmusican/final-results/kinecting-music-human.pdf

It's about using kinect and MIDI for interacting with an virtual orchester.

 

MIDI certainly has advantages, but the format is so old and unpractical ( notoriously difficult to parse ) that the main reason to support it is it's popularity. OSC is much more flexible and precise, if less compact.

Also, using MIDI to trigger samples from sound banks is certainly doable. But it doesn't mean that you get virtual instruments for free - you still need proper samples to be loaded, and that can take quite a bit of memory. A barely functional piano sound bank ( 10 s sustain on 4 octaves, mono 44.1 kHz, minor thirds, interpolating the rest in real time ) will require 14 Mb of ram, no way around that.

A fully sampled piano with both staccato and sustained samples, piano and forte, and that's close to 200 Mb of audio data you're looking at, for a relatively low key bank. The samples could be compressed in memory, but that would potentially cause a lot of overhead as tens of samples will need to be decoded simultaneously.

Clever memory management and dynamic loading / unloading of samples can help when playing a known MIDI file, but at the expense of realtime interactions.

I hope the OP chimes in and expands on what they have in mind.

Cheers,

Gregzo

 

This is one thing i was considering, if midi support went in, i think OSC would be a perfectly suitable contender for a complementing format in the same ballpark, with similar recognition in machine control. Both would be pretty impressive and all kinds of useful, it'd make Unity a go-to platform for installations

This stuff could open a whole new, very exciting market for the software

 

G-Audio uses Sound Banks and Sample Banks, so it seems possible to overcome such problems at least for you. Low level MIDI support would not replace Audio tools like G-Audio. G-Audio is the kind of tools I would like to see build around or using a native Unity MIDI interface. The price tag of 57 € wouldn't stop me to buy your tool from the asset store, but we need the interaction on a note level per channel and instrument. Control of timing, etc...

(The lower quality is trade-off for the sake of interactivity. MIDI support does not exclude OSC support.)

Best n42

 

Trackers are equally as straight forward to use and are only slightly different from MIDI sequencers.

How is this different from a tracker module exactly? Tracker modules are essentially just a MIDI-style system with samples included in the module. Anything you are capable of doing with MIDIs, short of actually integrating with the hardware, should be doable with tracker modules as well.

Tracker modules are as platform independent as you can get as all the data necessary to play the module is included inside the module itself.

 

Or you could just use midi to do exactly the same thing and escape implementation bias, support everything, be an accepted standard for a ton of things, not just music creation and not insist on an absolutely bizarre and confounding specialisation that benefits pretty much noone as opposed to potentially making Unity natively a multimedia 'real stuff' foundation. I don't know if you're trolling really

 

I'm offering my opinion and experience concerning trackers in an attempt to correct what appears to me as little more than biased or simply uninformed statements.

Some may assume that my opinion is biased, but I have no actual problems with MIDI itself for those situations it is useful in. Bringing it to Unity would be nice for those apps/games that could actually benefit from it as more than merely an alternative music format.

But to use it solely as an alternative music format is simply not a good reason. Maybe you can name a game that has used it to good effect as merely music. Because I certainly cannot. Yes, you can include a custom soundfont but at that point you probably are losing any space saving benefits you were trying to achieve in the first place.

 

Excellent troll tactic, accusing others of trolling when your position is much more nonsensical.

UT is talking about supporting MIDI for music. They've said nothing about supporting MIDI for controlling lighting or anything else. Just music. So "an accepted standard for a ton of things, not just music creation" and "potentially making Unity natively a multimedia 'real stuff' foundation" is utterly irrelevant.

In terms of the format itself, in this context, MOD has no disadvantages compared to MIDI. MIDI has smaller filesizes, but that advantage depends on samples already being present on the target device/sound card/OS/player, which is not something that Unity can possibly rely on. So, the only reasonable way to support MIDI would be to include samples in the build. And...hey, there goes the size advantage, and guess what, now you've basically created a MOD file!

From all I've heard the only advantage MIDI has (in this context, at least) is that the tools for creating MIDI are more numerous and superior to MOD sequencing tools available. Beyond that it's simply "let's support an extra format because it's good to support more formats". Not that that's a problem, and I think MIDI support would be a positive thing; it's your post which is silly.

 

They're also generally commercial. Renoise is the only tracker I can think of that is not completely free.

 

Hi there My name is Dustin Hagen and I am a Programmer and Musician.

I would find deep cross platform integrated Midi Support absolutely fantastic and vital for some of my future unity projects.

Expanding on midi support I believe sound font integration is a must! Sound Fonts are vital to allowing your midi files to take on any sound or voice.

For Multiple Reasons I would love Midi:
Rather than having mp3 or wav files I could use .midi files for all the music and sound effects. File size is extremely minimalistic.

Another reason is I plan on making sheet music learning software based in Unity. With midi support I can actually interface with midi instruments and hardware devices. I also have in the works a Bluetooth midi converter to be able to send midi through Bluetooth to be able to send and receive the data through iOS and Android.

Thanks Guys!

 

More useless time wasting crap I have no need to do. You may enjoy tinkering with computers. I don't. I enjoy getting actual work and invention done.

Gimme midi and stop shoving me down dead end rabbit holes.

 

Using one of the more cross-platform friendly game engines while forcing yourself to a single platform. Such wonderful irony.

I enjoy getting actual work done as well and sometimes the little inconveniences of spending time installing and trying new products can bring actual time saving benefits down the road. Your choice though.

 

I learned about tracker files thanks to this thread

They do address the space problem that I was having, but there are not a lot of tracker files I can download, and they tend to sound very retro. The tools to make tracker files look absolutely horrible, and I have the musical skills of a donkey, so it is not like I could make some myself.

Not that MIDI is a great solution, I am also not finding anything that sounds good, they all sound like 8 bit music.

If anyone has a link to some nice tracker tunes I could license it would be great.

 

Have you found the Mod Archive yet?

http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_license&query=publicdomain

 

Dude..Back down or I will unleash my multisyllabic woo woo gun on your trolling of me. I have food poisoning today and am not in the mood for your antics.. I have need for MIDI in the next five products being brought to market. This includes software (written in Unity) and hardware. The prototypes are being configured with Arduino. Arduino does not support tracker MOD's. Tracker files are useless for including in a general musician consumer product/tool.. I cannot make it any more clear than that. I have an Athlon XP box in the corner..but have never had a need to fire it up..and hope I never have to.

 

StarManta would you like to point out the word 'music' in this post, or exhibit any understanding on the subject

 

By the way Unity3D is also a commercial tool and the company depends on selling the Pro licenses and running the asset store. So what is the issue with professional and commercial tools?

Unity3d supports already tracker modules: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/TrackerModules.html or here http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/06/29/mod-in-unity/. No real need to discuss that stuff here. Everyone who is used to the Tracker-workflow of composing music can do it already and that is pretty fine.

Our musician uses Logic Pro X along with his midi-keyboard-controller or he enters notes directly in to the note editor (half of the time). The music is going to be exported as midi file for the interactive parts or in AIFF format. The sheet music can be exported in musicxml format. Simple and straight forward. I guess most musicians/composers out there have a similar workflow.

 

More crap from you..back off.. I do not do what you do. I do what I do and I am very good at knowing exactly what I need or would not be CTO in charge of R&D for new products. The irony is that you actually think you are me. So be kind to this forum and back off with the baragrugous balatron routine.

Gimme midi and stop trolling me.

 

Try pulling those midi files into an app like Logic Pro..which i use.. and assigning instruments. They sound as good as you want. I can make Night On Bald Mountain sound just like an orchestral recording. Or assign the midi files channels and notes to a bunch of servos and watch it "dance" through the file. Or send it through a DMX controller and stage lighting rig and watch it generate an amazing 19 minute light show.. music? That is only one part of the implementation of this massively supported format. Unity should have supported it since 2.x

 

You just don't get it. MIDI is a format that can be used in any number of areas. It is not up to Unity to provide interfaces to all those. That is up to the individual developer to decide how to use the format. Support at the engine level will alleviate delays between the devices. If you don't want it fine..leave the thread to those who understand it's capabilities, are aware of the sheer number of controller surfaces that use it and all the pro software musicians use where it is ubiquitous...

 

That is nice, but I don't think I can bundle Logic Pro inside a mobile game. I don't know a whole lot about MIDI, can it be made to sound good in a mobile game with fairly minimum overhead?

From a game developer point of view, the most useful thing to do with MIDI is music.
Only a few would care about anything else.

 

We made Physynth (in my sig) which would have really used it. The reasons we can see midi being useful for is the same reason people run Unity on weird droid devices - to experiment, to exhibit and so on. Midi's core usefulness with musicians depends on how useful the new fmod would be.

Otherwise if they're at the point where they have to integrate a new sound engine, they can manage midi themselves.

Unity does get used for apps.

 

Agree with hippocoder. I would like to see improvements to the Unity Audio engine before Midi can be supported. I work for a music company developing software and apps using unity. Currently to much latency issues with fmod. Ended up writing our own audio engine.

 

Read my post. I went out of my way to say I did support adding it.

 

You can animate with MIDI for another example. So there is much more than music.. Doing a read about it before making assumptions will make you appear more well versed to your fellow devs.. You do not have to load Logic Pro into your game.. That is an entirely ambiguous interpretation of what I stated.. You create samples of what you liked and make a soundfont to play in the app.

 

If I wanted to appear more well versed, then I would not flat out say that I don't know much about MIDI, would I? Plus reading about MIDI is a waste of time, it is not like Unity supports it. Sheesh, forgive me for asking a simple question on a forum.

I am sure MIDI can sound wonderful with that software. My point is that this is irrelevant to a mobile game dev, which is where MIDI would be the most useful to me and to a lot of devs.

It is a simple question: Can MIDI sound good in mobile? yes, no and depends are perfectly good answers that don't need hours of reading to figure out.

 

You may want to take your own advice. I have no problems with MIDI support in Unity and would welcome it for those situations it makes sense.

Using it solely for in-game music though is simply not one of them. Adding a soundfont would increase the size of the binaries and pretty much kill any advantage MIDI had over tracker modules or other formats.

I'm sorry you have food poisoning, but if you are really feeling that bad maybe you should simply stop responding to those of us simply trying to offer advice and opinions as well as ways to get around limitations as they currently exist.

Certainly. I just want to see them do a good attempt at support it. Namely I want to see hardware integration and the ability to save MIDIs from the engine. Anything less would feel like a waste of time.

 

Well publicised midi support, and i'd really hope osc along with it or kept very firmly as a future addition planned, would make Unity so incredibly useful for stage shows, multimedia events, expos, experimental sensory cooperative sessions, very cohesive forward looking whole-venue crowd participating music/theater/insert very exciting leftfield performance-norm-breaking only-possible-now-technology-has-got-this-far-things. It's literally an entire new strong position to be in for engineering modern performance installations, particularly if it goes into free as many cities have thriving arts and alternative scenes and being given such a powerful tool would get a bunch of the intelligent socially-based art event guys very excited. In pro you could have the whole thing controlling all manner of things plus provide cutting edge visuals for your displays and i even consider things like reappropriating the physics engine to drive all manner of light, sound, custom robotics and hardware implementations or more

You can get software specialising in the field no doubt but i bet hands down they'd not be nearly as friendly as Unity is and not even remotely as accessible to experimental not-for-profit entertainment guys with genuinely innovative ideas but not the bunch of money classically needed to gain entry to the very specialised fields of electronics, lighting and such in a performance/installation based context. Unity doesn't even need to attempt to cover the needs of all that, its not Unity's remit, but with midi and osc support it presents clever resourceful folk with a powerful tool with media representation as an intrinsic element of its operation for taking social, promotion or whatever events truly into unknown inventive waters

That's pretty much what Unity can provide with midi and osc support, bet it seemed such a small deal at first

You could make games that involve entire venues as a stage and the attendees as players - always good to step out of the box

Oh and goldbug you could use midi to drive a software synthesizer and they can be coded to be absolutely tiny too, and still sound fantastic

 

Oh or we could forget all that and have moar trackers 4 our mobiles muzik plox

 

I wouldn't exactly call Play(), Pause() and Stop() supported.

 

http://studio.foriero.com/examples/midisynth/midisynth.html
http://studio.foriero.com/examples/midisynth2/midisynth2.html

Software synths for Unity that sound the same on every platform..

 

You were effing trolling me and still are. Regardless of food poisoning or not I still know when someone is trying to take a lick out of me and I don't let that happen. I put up some software synth links. These load so fast that your "concerns" are shown to be totally bogus and yer just blowing smoke out of your lower fundament.

 

Amazing how you are claiming I'm trolling while completely ignoring the actual "concerns" that were stated. It was never an issue of load speed. It was an issue of size. Which can be quite important if you're trying to squeeze every single kilobyte onto a low-end mobile device.

So now that I've seen your web demos in action, I'd like some additional info. Namely if a soundfont is being used and if so how big it is. If you are using a soundfont, a link to the MIDI so I can run it through a tracker would be nice as well.

I apologize if this info is provided on your website, but I couldn't get anything aside from the demos themselves to actually load. No idea if the issue is on my side or yours, but my ISP did do a temporary blink earlier so its probably an issue with them.

 

Don't you understand what a synthesizer is? What are you doing in this thread?

It's pretty expected for 'gamers' to be quite trolly in gaming forums because i guess the average age of the userbase is 14 and they can afford to be mindless and obnoxious. It's very, very sad when 'games developers ' themselves are intent on harming the progress of videogames as a supporting medium for an increasingly huge area of possibilities. What drives people to do this?

 

Obviously it is due to the inherent limitations MIDI has as a purely musical platform. Even the highest quality MIDIs simply do not match up to the standards that we have come to expect in the gaming industry. Especially for platforms that are not size limited.

Including a quality soundfont is certainly helpful to compete with tracker modules, but to achieve parity with most MP3s you would need to include the monstrous samples that come with most commercial software suites. We are not talking megabytes of samples. We are talking gigabytes of samples.

Along with computer hardware capable of realtime playback. My experience with musical suites is a bit old and primarily limited to Cakewalk, but I do not remember ever having realtime playback with samples of sufficient quality to mimic an MP3. Certainly not on a system you would find in most homes let alone mobile devices.

So if you cannot reach the quality, why would you use MIDI for purely game musical playback? Might as well ask yourself why you would choose the most limited and worst quality format. Because that is essentially what you would be doing.