Music Insertion Guide for Beginners

Tutorials
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41

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.

42

You should post your question on an Ableton user group

I use Mixcraft which is lower-end software and it does both of those things with drag and drop so I’ve no doubt that Ableton is able to do the same

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43

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.

44

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.

45

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.

46

Oh! Well, I guess that makes the topic I just created kinda pointless. I’ll try that later and let you know how it goes.

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47

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.

48

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.

49

Hey, first post on here, so no idea about any of the etiquette, but hope asking questions like this here is okay, especially because it’s such a dead post, or if it’s something I should take to the FEBuilder thread directly… or even make it a separate post, I genuinely have no idea.
I’ve been inserting MIDIs for a while now and generally had no issues, at least no issues that couldn’t be solved.
I ran into a strange one today where my inserted enemy phase BGM, which previously worked just fine, suddenly started sounding weird with one of the instruments constantly cutting out, as if there were too many sounds playing at once (they weren’t).
I experimented with it as much as I can, and know what triggers it and what seems to be at fault… I just also have no idea how to fix it.

Basically… this only happens when I resume a game after leaving during enemy phase.
If I restart the chapter normally and this song comes on, everything works fine, but the second I reset or just close the game, and then resume the chapter, that’s when it happens.
Additionally, I found out exactly what causes it, which is the title screen music.
I just replaced the title screen music for the first time recently, something I held off on, until now.
I didn’t overwrite it however, just changed the track ID in the FEBuilder patches from 43 to AD, where my new one was in.
The second I switch back to 43, the default title screen BGM, the inserted enemy phase song works perfectly again.
I tested more, and turns out that if I set the title screen song to my other inserted MIDIs, they lead to the same issue.

At first I thought there was just something weird and different about my inserted MIDIs that doesn’t allow them to be used for the title screen, but turns out when I actually change the enemy phase BGM to any of the other tracks, they do not have same issue, regardless of whether I have a custom title screen music or not.
They sound fine, no instruments bugging out.
So in the end, it seems the song I want to use as the enemy phase BGM might be the main issue after all, but I don’t know what’s wrong with it.

And again, it works completely fine otherwise, only when resuming a chapter while it plays, and on top of that only if I’ve changed the title screen music (which obviously plays right before this when I resume a chapter, so there could be something strange there) to another custom track.
Outside of this very specific scenario, zero issues with the enemy phase track, so there IS a weird interaction with the title screen music here, which is also why I’m not sure if it’s an issue to be fixed on that end, or the enemy phase BGM itself.

I’m just completely lost here, and hope there’s at least someone out there who might know what the problem could be, or is willing to help by maybe checking the .s files out, should it be something you can solve in those.