MIDI and MP3/OGG comparison. Help needed

[yarooze]

Boyz and girls and need a little bit help.

I'm thinking about different misic formats. Wich to use in the game. OGG/MP3 are much bigger, but I don't really know, how the MIDIs will sound on another computer.

Please halp me to choose.  :

I made this two files. One MP3 and another MIDI. They sound equal on my PC (WinXP, Media Player Classic). Please compare them (if possible with different players) and tell me how different the sound on your computer.

So I  need:

1. Comparison (how different they sound)
2. Your system and player (for example PC, WinXP, Media Player 7)


http://www.mediafire.com/?49t5adcn55m

http://www.mediafire.com/?99azltdto2l



Thank you for your help
I'll send you many free internets for this 
Yarooze

[Galen]

Unless you have bought a very good soundcard (Some sort of Roland crap) seperately they won't be enough of a difference to warrant the increase, let alone make any improvement.

[Nikolas]

very fast, don't have the time to listen right now.

Keep in mind that midi does NOT contain any AUDIO information and thus it depends solely on the soundcard of each computer. This is why older games had different versions for Adlib, Soundblaster, Roland, etc...

Something to keep in mind.

Then again mp3/ogg is worth it only if you can render it right. If you only can make the midi file into an mp3, there doesn't seem much point really. And midi is tiny in size compared to mp3/ogg.

[Khris]

I've got onBoard sound, AC'97, on an XP system. They sound the same, so stick to midi.

[OneDollar]

Mines on board and I can't really tell the difference. That is they both sound like a MIDI. I'd say to use MIDI unless you're going for high quality sound, in which case use OGG (I think its lossless and its smaller than MP3 anyway), and obviously make your music for that quality.

Scaling MIDI up to MP3 or OGG is fairly pointless, and I reckon most modern sound cards will handle MIDI in pretty much the same way.

[m0ds]

Both sound exactly the same on my machine

[yarooze]

Thank you, boyz and girls! 

here is your internet: click it!

Hmm, MIDI also... 

[voh]

I know I'm late, but I just wanted to add my 2 cents. The MP3 version actually sounds slightly worse due to the encoding artefacts. While a regular audio listener won't notice it, playing it through an audio workstation makes it fairly clear. They sound the same, but the MIDI file is clear

[tube]

You already got your answer, but I'll pipe in anyway. The midi actually sounds quite different on my system. I'm using software midi synthesis (TiMidity) and a free soundfont called SGM on a laptop running linux. Too bad AGS linux doesn't support midi.

[yarooze]

Aha! There are differeces on some systems! 

Feel free to post your test results. It is not the end! 

[nihilyst]

They sound exactly the same for me either ... MIDI might even be a bit better.

I've used WMP, SMPlayer and Winamp. All turn up with the same results.

[Gilbert]

Personally, I'll say unless the WAVE/MP3/OGG is rendered with a VERY decent synthesiser (or you have other "pro-recording" edits to the sounding of it afterwards, or used many synthesiser specific features like GS or XG so players' systems might not play it correctly),  go with MIDI.
In most cases, the difference in how the MIDI sounds is not much of a problem, especially in the case when the player has a synthesiser far better than the one you used, if you just render it into a wave, you have removed his opportunity of getting much better musics and furthermore, wasting more of his HDD space.

[EldKatt]

unless you're going for high quality sound, in which case use OGG (I think its lossless and its smaller than MP3 anyway)

Just for the record, since nobody has pointed it out: OGG is not lossless (it's in principle about as lossy as mp3 is), but it is open-source and free for commercial use (this is really one of the big reasons to use it out in the real world), and supposedly (AFAIK) has a better perceived quality to size ratio.

And less OT: Going by how your question is asked, I would say that if you don't know whether you need audio (wav, mp3, ogg, etc), you probably don't. I wouldn't want to download or buy a full audio soundtrack consisting of some guy's GM soundcard rendition of MIDI files. Without going into specifics, which others have done, no, in your case audio is not necessary.

[tube]

Just for the record, since nobody has pointed it out: OGG is not lossless (it's in principle about as lossy as mp3 is), but it is open-source and free for commercial use (this is really one of the big reasons to use it out in the real world), and supposedly (AFAIK) has a better perceived quality to size ratio.

Yeah, maybe OneDollar confused Ogg Vorbis with the lossless Ogg Flac. Flac achieves a good compression ratio for a lossless codec, but it doesn't come close to mp3 or Ogg Vorbis. Of these lossy codecs, Vorbis invariably beats mp3 in listening tests at the bitrates we're interested in.

[Oliwerko]

I was the same opinion as others, but - I played them both and the mp3 sounds a lot better on my system. In the MIDI one, I almost can't hear the high sounds (the main melody)!

My config:

Win XP Prof.SP2, Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi, Winamp/ZoomPlayer, same on both of them.

[FSi++]

Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi

Weird, because Creative used to make sound cards that sounded... good. Maybe there's something wrong with your setup?
On my SB Live! 5.1 with 8MB SoundFont bank MIDI one sounds better.

[Oliwerko]

Well, everything else sounds crystal clear and as you said...good.
I dunno why it is like this with the MIDI. I mean, I can hear the main melody, but the bass tones are waaay louder.

[OneDollar]

Yeah, maybe OneDollar confused Ogg Vorbis with the lossless Ogg Flac

Its more likely I don't know what I'm talking about
I remember .ogg had a lot of pros over .mp3, but I must have got the losslessness wrong. I'm a sucker for anything open source anyway...

[Inkoddi]

It may also be worth mentioning, that MP3 adds a few milliseconds of silence in the beginning and the end of the file. So if you want your audio files to loop seamlessly, use OGG.