Questions

[Slywyn]

I'm attempting to create a track for Heavyweight by Infected Mushroom, I even have a decent MIDI file of it(I'll attach it below).

The problem is that whenever I load it into 3MLE it just... doesn't work. It loads fine in any MIDI program I can think of, and plays fine. But most of the time 3MLE refuses to load it to begin with, and even when 3MLE DOES load it, the track is mangled.

Does it have a memory limit that it's running into when trying to load this track or something? I can't understand why it isn't working.

(FYI the actual 'music' of the Heavyweight track is all on the "Grand Piano" track with no numbers behind it if you try to load it into 3MLE. Check on something like 'MidiEditor' if you can't get it to load either. It's all there, I promise.)

 

Also any time that I attempt to change tempo mid-song(I was attempting to make a 'suite' of the Elder Scrolls songs or whatever you'd call it). The tempo had to go 150 > 180 > 120 but it just didn't work. Any time you tried, it might play okay in 3MLE but as soon as you put it ingame all the parts would play on top of each other and it just became a mess. Didn't matter if you put everything into 2 tracks or put it into 6 tracks with rests, changing tempo just murdered it.

Heavyweight.mid

Edited October 27, 2018 by Slywyn

[butterbattle]

See here: https://musicalnexus.net/forums/forum/39-guides/

1) When importing into 3MLE, are you importing one track at a time? In the import settings window, only check one track on the bottom right at a time. Additionally, above that, check convert one midi track into multiple MML tracks and bring non-note events together into one track.

2) If you are changing the tempo, 3MLE syncs all the tracks but the in game player does not. You have to change the tempo for each track individually. The mess you are hearing is the melody being a different tempo from all the other tracks. 

Edited October 27, 2018 by butterbattle

[Slywyn]

4 hours ago, butterbattle said:

See here: https://musicalnexus.net/forums/forum/39-guides/

1) When importing into 3MLE, are you importing one track at a time? In the import settings window, only check one track on the bottom right at a time. Additionally, above that, check convert one midi track into multiple MML tracks and bring non-note events together into one track.

2) If you are changing the tempo, 3MLE syncs all the tracks but the in game player does not. You have to change the tempo for each track individually. The mess you are hearing is the melody being a different tempo from all the other tracks. 

1) I've only ever imported multiple tracks at once and it's worked with... pretty much every song I've ever tried it with.
Though this did still help! I imported just the one track from the Heavyweight track(The only one with any data on it at all) and it actually worked! I told it to split the one track into multiples, I think the program was either overflowing or just couldn't load all the notes into one track, but it finally loaded the song when it was split into eight by the program. So yay!

3) I have tried this but is there some method to changing tempo mid-track in the game that I'm just not noticing or that I don't know of? The ingame editor doesn't seem to recognize tempo changes at all, no matter what I do it comes out as a garbage mess with everything stacked on top of itself.

[butterbattle]

The video I linked explains most of the problems you're probably having in more detail. 

4 hours ago, Slywyn said:

3) I have tried this but is there some method to changing tempo mid-track in the game that I'm just not noticing or that I don't know of? The ingame editor doesn't seem to recognize tempo changes at all, no matter what I do it comes out as a garbage mess with everything stacked on top of itself.

Unfortunately, the editor in the game is still missing a lot of features, so I wouldn't recommend trying to fix it there. Specifically, when trying to sync the tempo changes, you won't be able to tell if it's at the right location. This can be frustrating because it'll sound correct on 3MLE, but not in the game...…..

In 3MLE, you can see the tempo changes on the left in yellow with a time stamp. If the time stamp matches on each track for the tempo changes, it should work. 

[Slywyn]

40 minutes ago, butterbattle said:

The video I linked explains most of the problems you're probably having in more detail. 

Unfortunately, the editor in the game is still missing a lot of features, so I wouldn't recommend trying to fix it there. Specifically, when trying to sync the tempo changes, you won't be able to tell if it's at the right location. This can be frustrating because it'll sound correct on 3MLE, but not in the game...…..

In 3MLE, you can see the tempo changes on the left in yellow with a time stamp. If the time stamp matches on each track for the tempo changes, it should work. 

Like I said, I tried that and it just ended up a garbled jumble mess ingame, or it played one tempo the whole song and completely ignored the change entirely.

[butterbattle]

Hmm, I see your midi at the top. Can you drop whatever MML you're working on too? I'd like to see it if I can. 

[Slywyn]

8 hours ago, butterbattle said:

Hmm, I see your midi at the top. Can you drop whatever MML you're working on too? I'd like to see it if I can. 

Sure. I have like two different versions of it where I was trying different ways to fix it, but I think it might just be beyond me unfortunately.

 

ElderScrollsSuite-10k-piano.mml

ElderScrollsSuitTryingToFix.ms2mml

[butterbattle]

Okay, quite a few different things:

1) There are only two notes playing at a time for each piece. Was that the case in the original midi file? I have to imagine that there were more tracks than this. 

2) You only need as many tracks as the highest number of notes that ever play at the same time.

That's probably a confusing sentence.

Basically, since this file only has two notes playing at the same time, it's possible to create the song with only 2 tracks instead of 6. Of course, manually reducing the number of tracks can be very tedious, especially in more complex songs. In this case however, you can paste tracks 3 and 4 to the ends of 1 and 2. The same for 5 and 6. The challenge here is to make sure that the next song starts correctly. You have to count your rests and make sure that the tempo markers line up on the left. But once you accomplish this step, the song will be much easier to work with. Additionally, all of those rests in the extra tracks take up a significant amount of room and could be the difference between fitting it onto a sheet in-game or not.  

3) Again, in order for the song to work in the game, you have to put the same tempo in each track.

In this MML file, I only see tempo markers for tracks 1, 3, and 5, and they are not at the same locations either. 

In music, 'rests' are affected by the tempo just like everything else. Therefore, tracks 3 through 6 still need the marker for 't150' at the beginning, etc. Think about it. If that wasn't indicated, how would the score know how long to pause for? It would just count rests according to whatever the default tempo is.

We're not exactly doing computer programming, but it's still a kind of coding, and sometimes we need to step back a minute and think about what we're actually saying to the software.    

4) Once you've got a good idea of how a song is setup and a good handle on how to interact with the piano roll and time stamps, I recommend going to the "track" dropdown at the top, then selecting "optimize" track. Ultimately, all the line indicators, arrows, and other junk at the beginning is unnecessary. At best, they just take up space and at worse, they could mess up your song. 

Well, this was about as much as I could do with it. 

Before optimizing:

ElderScrollsSuite-bop.mml

After optimizing:

ElderScrollsSuite-aop.mml

Edit: 

And here's the in-game file. 

ElderScrollsSuite.ms2mml

Edited October 28, 2018 by butterbattle