Hey, thanks for the guide! I have been following romhacks since I was young and recently have really been considering getting into making music for them. I have a question in regards for using MIDI music:
So I have to use a .midi file and not a .wav or .mp3 with all of this, I get that much. My question is, how do I get a MIDI file with multiple tracks? I can export any singular track as MIDI from the DAW I use, Ableton, but not mulitple tracks onto one file. Do I just not have that functionality, and I’ll have to use Anvil Studio to make MIDI music w/multiple tracks from scratch? I can’t find a function that lets me insert multiple single-track MIDI files into Anvil, either. I can only get one single MIDI track in. Thanks for your help.
That’s a good idea. I’ve been looking it up but had no success on finding an answer; I’ll go and post the question myself, thanks.
Edit: So it turns out Ableton doesn’t have it implemented, for some reason. I guess I’ll see if I want to mess around with another DAW to make my midis instead.
I just started work on my romhack in FEBuilderGBA yesterday (I’ve already finished the script and all the assets ahead of time; all I have left to do is the technical nitty-gritty), and even after replacing the main theme AND changing which song plays on the main menu (i.e. after inserting my desired track over a blank track), the standard main theme still plays on the menu. What’s going on here? The main menu theme shouldn’t even be there anymore.
Also, fwiw, the debug emulator feature (press F5) doesn’t work, and I have to use an external emulator.
There’re two versions of the main theme in the ROM, one at 02 (plays when the opening cutscene isn’t skipped) and one at 43 (plays when the opening cutscene is skipped)
If you’re using the patches in FEB that automatically skip the cutscene, make sure that you either have it set to track 43 or use patch “MUSIC_Main theme(OP title screen) 0x43” and change it to the one that you want to play.
Okay, so, now my issue is that the song I imported is a solo piano piece, yet it rendered as two piano tracks (LH and RH) and only the RH part is playing. I can’t seem to assign an instrument to the LH track. Any ideas?
For reference, the “rendered as two piano tracks” bit is a result of the notation software I used. If that’s the issue (i.e. if it plays normally if you somehow manage to render it as a single track instead), then that’s that, I guess. I’d just rather not have to go back through and do this to ALL my tracks. haha never mind, I imported the original midi and still had this problem. I’m gonna go back and separate all the piano parts into two SEPARATE piano tracks (instead of a LH and RH part of the same staff) and report back.
HAHAHA so! What I did was 1) add a blank piano staff below the existing piano staff (just in case that would trick the system into processing everything else as a single track), 2) change the instrument set from native 2 to just plain native, and 3) change it from processing with sappy to processing with FEBuilderGBA. I don’t know which of these was the trick, but SOMETHING worked.
Hopefully anyone else who might be having this problem now has a solution.