Music hacking help topic

I’ve tried another song as I probably won’t use the one with one track later on. I want to test one that I will use.
It sounds very full in Sappy as all of the instruments are playing correctly.

By the way, it is Eternal Bond.

Multiple tracks. Right?
In the ROM, once again, I only hear one track at a time. The weird thing is, though, when one part has rest, another part will come in and then cut out when the first part’s resting is done. There will always be some part playing, but only one at a time.
I have applied the supplied patch.

As I said previously it’s because they are Square waves and the GBA is only capable of playing 1 square wave at once. Switch these to a direct instrument and it should play much better.

On another note, it sounds fine in a clean ROM with Blazer’s patch.

Possible noob question:
Is there any reason why I can’t stick Blazer’s patch somewhere in my ROM and say the instrument map is in there?

you can but you would have to manually repoint every single instrument which would take a very long time OR just clear out the space he uses in the patch

the music sounds fine with Blazer’s patch because he is using a full voice table with all the entries as direct or multi sounds whereas again you’re using blank entries which default to square waves

Ah, yes. That sounds… interesting. I’ll just have to work around it. I think FEditor put most frame animations there. I’ll just see what’s broken and re-insert it.

But then again, nothing in this field is that easy. I’ll manage to find some way to screw it up.

I feel so noobish for asking you so many questions.

Do you know if an equivalent to Blazer’s Instrument Patch exists for FE8 use?

There’s an FE8 Native Instrument Map available.

Thank you. This will make my life much easier.

Hey, Agro. I’m here to haunt this topic again.
I’ve gotten just about everything else working except for one thing: looping. I’ve tried the method with the brackets in Anvil, and they did nothing. Do you know the code in a .s file for looping? I tried ‘disassembling’ one myself, and Sappy kept nagging me about a bad file name. It didn’t like “Test.s”
I’m sooo close; I appreciate any help.

It’s usually done with a GOTO label command. However you may get the timing wrong if you don’t do it correctly. Can you please send a screenshot of how you’re doing things in Anvil? The method is pretty flawless although perhaps it doesn’t work in some versions of Anvil.

I may have a slightly different version. 2015.08.04


I am putting the ending cue slightly before the end of the song to ensure that it reaches it. Should it be right at the end?

Apologies, I read this and didn’t get a chance to write a reply. It should indeed be at the end but that shouldn’t influence it. With your MIDI file, can you please try Save As into a separate MIDI file, and then open it up again in Anvil?

If the square brackets are still there that means the file is being saved correctly and you shouldn’t be having any problems.

If not, then you’re either not inserting the brackets correctly (I wouldn’t know as I don’t use Anvil) or they’re not being saved across, which may or may not be due to the type of MIDI file they’re being saved into (Type 0 vs. Type 1).

Nope. I save the MIDI, close out, then go back in, and the brackets are still there.

Although, I force-saved as a type 0, and it worked fine! Weird.

Thanks, Agro. You’re a big help.

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From my experience with Anvil, exporting the song to type-0 before feeding it to mid2agb tends to reduce the amount of things that can go wrong. Also keep in mind that if you use Repair Song/Track (useful for getting rid of redundant events), Anvil will delete the [ ] cue events thinking that they’re garbage, so you need to add them back afterward.

As for where exactly the ] cue goes, I just go to the song’s last note, move the cursor to the right once, and put it there.

edit: I also recommend keeping Anvil up to date; the updates can actually be pretty useful iirc

Well, first question since long…
I got my hands on a song, I inserted every sample the right way I guess.
Sappy is playing the song perfectly, but once in-game it just screeches loudly. I can still barely hear the base melody. So yeah I wanted to know if that happend before or if anyone knows why it happens.

Any chances this could be related to Samples wanting to be ALIGN 4?

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Yes, samples all need to be 4-aligned. You are loading up the game fresh and not from an emulator state, right? I’ve had it happen before where the music glitches out in that way when loading a state, since when you do that the game still expects the instruments to be in their old locations and hasn’t been updated to read their new pointers yet.

Yey that solved the problem! It’s playing beautifully thanks! However I have another issue.
I extracted the song from a DS game using VGM trans, but the last 2 tracks were merged in the process.
I could try to split them manually, but it’s going to be rather long… Is there a reason why and a fix I can apply to VGM trans forthat?
Also, the song is 15 tracks long, but is always extracted with a dummy first track called “BGM XX” Making it a 16 tracks MIDI with a dummy first Track and a double last track (lol)

Edit : in fact, it’s the very first and very last track that are merged together, while when inserted in the rom, the first track is back in its place and the last 2 tracks are merged. I honestly dont understand anything ahah.

Check the tracks’ channels (1—16). I suspect that the song has multiple tracks using the same channel. You usually don’t need to keep a dummy track around; even if it has events that are essential to the song, you can always merge it into another track.

The thing with the two tracks being merged entirely into one track sounds weird, but it’s probably just an effect of using a song ripped straight from a game with VGMTrans. There are always going to be eccentricities that you’ll have to fix.

What do you mean when you say they were merged? Do you mean you mean two separate lines of music playing at once? The DSFE games often have 2-3 related lines on one channel to save on space (cf Endless Battle). It’s unusual for VGMTrans to erroneously merge tracks; most likely they’re merged because that’s how they are in-game

Well I screwed around and made that “ok” to hear, but it’s rather curious. Actually inserting the song just merges the dummy track automatically so no problem. The game is Front mission on NDS, and it’s the very forst BGM when you drop it into VGMTrans
I ported all samples needed for it and it’s sound pretty good for about 70% of the song in FE7
But if you happend to extract that BGM 01 from Front mission, you’ll see what I meant by “merged”.