I recently re-read Sme’s guide on ripping music (it’s epic read it here) and I am currently on a music ripping bender.
This link [HERE] is to dropbox with folders for both FE4 and FE5 rips. This includes midi files and dls files (which you can ignore). The midis are fresh rips from their respective spc files – they haven’t been formatted for gba, but if you’re looking for a “clean midi” to start from, feel free to use these.
Also recommend looking at Sme’s FE3 rips which are already formatted.
OK, I’ve just had a look, and as I suspected there is a bit of weirdness in these MIDI rips (when is there not, in a MIDI rip?)
For example, in Girl of the Spirit Forest, Track 8 is mostly used for drums but briefly becomes a harp, but the instrument change isn’t programmed into the MIDI for whatever reason.
Volume changes seem to be coded into the “Volume” command rather than “Expression” so editing track master volume might be a bit of a task without running custom scripts.
Thankfully the tempo issue that spc2midi had is not an issue here but do be mindful that note starts are offset by exactly 333/1000ths of a beat so they will play back fine but will look weird in any DAW or if you edit your .s files by hand. This seemed to be in all of the files that I looked at.
Lastly, I’d probably add a caveat that most of them will need significant cleaning up, like how all the drumkit notes are not at all in line with general MIDI so they’ll have to be fixed as well.
Otherwise, thanks for uploading these - I’ve had a real hard time getting SNES ROMs to open in VGMTrans in the past so didn’t even realise this was possible.
I have another issue to report - this one is rather significant.
All the MIDI files have their internal tempo at half the actual tempo of the song. For example, Chapter 10 - Light and Dark has a programmed tempo of 63.47 where the actual tempo is 127 bpm. All the note lengths and start times still sound correct but it’s weirdly programmed. It results in some notes being shorter than the smallest rhythmic subdivision possible in the GBA music format (1/48th note, from memory). Basically, if you try to insert a lot of these, the rhythms will get quantized incorrectly which is going to result in wonky playback.
I think there are some scripts/programs out there that will reprogram the MIDI to double/halve the tempo and adjusting the note lengths/starts to compensate but to my knowledge these are only available with paid software like Sonar X8 and Cubase.
Seems like a good opportunity for anyone with the technical know-how to write something, but that person isn’t me. Anyway, not expecting @Pandan to fix this, but putting it here in case anyone tries to use the MIDIs and ends up with a weird result.