Runescape Music - Soundfonts?

[Alphanos]

Just recently I got interested in soundfonts again and got a nice setup going with BASSMIDI driver. My midi files now sound fantastic in when I play them with WinAmp. This got me to try playing a couple of old Runescape midi files as well, and they sound equally fantastic. However, in-game the Runescape music is unaffected.

 

Some Google searching suggests that in the past, changes to the default Windows midi handling setup would automatically affect Runescape as well, but Jagex changed things sometime in 2006-2007 in an effort to improve music quality for most players. That's great, but does anyone know if there's a (rule-permitted) way to apply soundfonts to Runescape's in-game music these days? I'm certain that the music quality would be much improved using the higher-quality samples in the soundfonts I now have loaded...

 

Background info: For anyone unfamiliar with soundfonts, midi synthesizers typically play all possible instrument notes/sounds/etc from a default sound bank that's either 2MB, 4MB, or 8MB in size. Obviously quality is limited by trying to fit sufficient sound samples for all possible orchestral instruments in this amount of space. For any unaware, this was one of the biggest limitations on the quality of Jagex's music for a very long time. I now have loaded a series of several soundfonts, the main one of which is >250MB -- this is like going from a 64 kbps MP3 to a 320 kbps MP3.

[Sy_Accursed]

Wasn't the big update that they changed their sound files from midi to mp3 ergo an expand midi bank has no relevance

[gspbeetle]

No, they are still using midi, except for sound effects, similar to pokemon games.

They just dont use our hardware synthesizer, because they think their software one is more efficient and awesome, which is half true.

Check my site if you want a dump of those files (google it, since you seem like to googe a lot).

(If you really want to know more about rs hacking(not cheating), we can help you in the other forum)

[Alphanos]

Check my site if you want a dump of those files (google it, since you seem like to googe a lot).

(If you really want to know more about rs hacking(not cheating), we can help you in the other forum)

 

Finding the midi files online isn't very difficult.

 

I was hoping Jagex had provided some nice and easy way to revert control to the local hardware synthesizer, maybe through a Java environment variable or something :(. I don't want to mess around with anything that would require i.e. a modified client or anything like that.

[Guest Melvinkooi]

Can you tell where you get that sound fonts? I want to hear how they sound with the fonts.

[gspbeetle]

Can you tell where you get that sound fonts? I want to hear how they sound with the fonts.

 

You mean the instruments rs use?

[Wkw]

I am also interested in where you got those soundfonts. I have a bunch of midis that I would like to hear better :P

 

 

Jagex doesn't use .midi anymore. I think it is either flac or mp3, because the sound is NOT a midi that the client can play. IMHO it is much worse aafter they changed it :\

[Guest Melvinkooi]

Can you tell where you get that sound fonts? I want to hear how they sound with the fonts.

 

You mean the instruments rs use?

No, the ones that the OP use.

[Alphanos]

Because I've also collected soundfonts previously, I can't indentify the source of all of the soundfont files that I have. This is made more complicated by the fact that many of the soundfont collection sites are falling into disrepair with the general shift in interest towards MP3/etc. So now the largest modern soundfont activity is in the professional music composition business. This means it can be hard to tell if an old, great-sounding soundfont file is now being shared i.e. on P2P because it's fallen off the original, intended-free hosting, or if it's now been changed to a commercial product.

 

Anyway, I'll give as many working links as I can find.

 

Utility Requirements:

 

To start with, you'll most likely need the following:

 

BASSMIDI Software Midi Synthesizer: I have a Creative Audigy 2 Platinum, a decent quality but slightly older soundcard. It has driver support to load soundfonts, but even if I allocate more memory to it, it can't handle loading more than about 300 MB worth of samples. Also, when it loads a soundfont it loads the entire thing into memory and keeps it there. The BASSMIDI software I linked to will install a software driver which can be set as Windows' default midi synthesizer, and works much better. It has been successfully tested with 4.5 GB+ worth of loaded soundfonts, and rather than trying to load everything into memory, it only loads the samples/instruments needed for what you're currently trying to play on it. In case it's non-obvious to anyone but me, although there's a file listing, you'll need to click the "Downloads" button to the right.

 

SFPack: There have been two "standard"' specialized compression formats designed for soundfonts. This is the older one.

sfArk: This is the newer soundfont compression format. Which one you find your fonts in depends on where you go, and how old the soundfont is.

 

My Soundfont Loading Recommendations:

 

In past playing around with soundfonts, I've run across situations where one GM soundfont will not play a particular instrument in a midi, while a different GM will not play a different instrument. For best results, I recommend loading 2-3 soundfonts, including at least one GS set, with the best-quality soundfonts loaded last to override overlapping lower-quality samples.

 

Here's a load order I had good results with:

 

Airfont 340 GS -- ~80 MB

Fluid R3 GM -- ~145 MB

Fluid R3 GS -- ~3 MB

Airfont 380 GM -- ~270 MB

 

As possible alternatives to the last Airfont 380 GM, you may want to play around with just using Fluid R3, or trying out RealFont 2.3 (~200 MB), SGM 2.0.1 (~240 MB), or Giant Soundfont 5.3 (~450 MB). Despite the huge size of the last, the others may be better options. Any of these will be far, far better than any default soundfont, but it's surprising the amount of difference in various areas between each high-quality soundfont.

 

Of course, if you have Colossus then load it.

 

Soundfonts:

 

Links I've been able to find to some good soundfonts. For reference, my soundcard by default uses CT4MGM, a 4 MB general midi soundfont.

 

General User: An early soundfont, about 30 MB uncompressed; an improvement from default soundfonts.

 

Personal Copy 5.1f: This is one of the smaller large soundfonts at around 60 MB uncompressed, but still a huge step up from any default soundfont.

 

RealFont 2.1: This is farther down the page, past a slightly older version of Personal Copy and some others. I've seen a RealFont version 2.3 which is almost twice the size, but I can't find a link to it. RealFont is probably better than Personal Copy; this version 2.1 is around 100 MB uncompressed.

 

Fluid R3: There are others listed on that page, but Fluid's the only worthwhile one IMO. Use the USA download link for it. This soundfont is a large, full-featured set - ~150 MB once uncompressed.

 

SGM 2.01: ~250 MB uncompressed, a high-quality large soundfont.

 

Giant Soundfont 5.3: One of the few soundfonts that's been around for ages, but still gets regularly updated and improved; it's easy to run across outdated versions of this on other sites. Note that you'll need to download banks 1, 2, and 3 of v5.3 as well as the drumkit which is labelled v2.8. Giant soundfont is a mixed bag IMO; at ~450 MB uncompressed, the sample quality is undoubtedly higher than many other soundfonts, but the balance between instruments is very noticeably off. Listening to midis where certain instruments intended to be playing the melody are quiet and hidden behind the harmony can be irritating.

 

Other Listings: This is a registration-required site which has alternate links to several of the above soundfonts, along with others.

 

Notable Soundfonts with No Links:

 

Airfont is an older, but very highly regarded soundfont for which I've only been able to see outdated versions on the main list sites. There are several versions available: 340 GM, 340 GS, 380 GM Beta (split into melodic and percussive), and 380 GM Final (back as one file). Finding links to any of these isn't hard with some googling, but as I've mentioned previously, the situation with this font makes it unclear to me whether the author stopped listing it on sites because they wanted to start offering it commercially? If so they did a poor job of marketing because they don't seem to be running any website for it any longer. Out of the four versions listed, the worthwhile ones are 340 GS (~80 MB) and 380 GM Final (~270 MB).

 

Commercial products:

 

Colossus Soundfont. Often considered to be the single best general midi set out there, the only way to get a better result would be to hand-pick individual instrument sets, which only professional musicians/composers really get into. This monster comes in three sizes: 1.5 GB, 2.5 GB, and 4.4 GB. Suffice it to say that if you get your hands in this, you should use it. Due to the way the BASSMIDI driver works, Colossus can be used even with lesser amounts of RAM, but you probably shouldn't try if you still have i.e. 512 MB of RAM or something.

 

Well, this turned out pretty long, but hopefully others will find it helpful :).

[gspbeetle]

I am also interested in where you got those soundfonts. I have a bunch of midis that I would like to hear better :P

 

 

Jagex doesn't use .midi anymore. I think it is either flac or mp3, because the sound is NOT a midi that the client can play. IMHO it is much worse aafter they changed it :\

 

They do use midi, but they use their own instruments/sound front, whatever you call it. Midi is just the scores, nothing to do with the sound.

So its neither, the output is just pure raw wave / analogue signals.