[SDL] [Little OT] Free Soundeffects for Games

[E. Wing]

>
>
> Another way if you don't have a microphone is to use, say a music
> composition
> program and a sound card with a very good MIDI synth module (assuming
> you've got
> those!). One of the "instruments" under MIDI GS is, if I'm recalling
> right, a
> sound effects generator. It has things like helicoptor rotors, gunshots,
> rain,
> thunder, etc. available at different MIDI note values.
>

LOL! General MIDI, there's something I haven't seen mentioned in a long
time. I couldn't resist responding :)

So the General MIDI Level 1 Spec defined 128 sounds, with only a small
subset being sound effects:

121 Guitar Fret Noise
122 Breath Noise
123 Seashore
124 Bird Tweet
125 Telephone Ring
126 Helicopter
127 Applause
128 Gunshot

(There are a few others under instruments that might be considered sound
effects too.)


Roland's GS extensions provided more and Yamaha's XG extensions may have
provided more too. The General Midi Level 2 spec attempted to unify a bunch
of the GS and XG extensions which added more sound effects, but the list is
still fairly small:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI_Level_2

So assuming any of these are sounds you can use, there are several things to
be aware of:
- The interpretation of the sounds will be very different from sound card to
sound card. So you might want/need to collect a lot of different sound cards
to find the right sound you are looking for. The flip side is that even the
worst sound cards occasionally have a sound you might find interesting.
(Well maybe not the worst...WaveBlaster 1 comes to memory. Bleh.)

- As far as I'm aware, GM2 never picked up widespread adoption in the mass
consumer market (came way after MIDI had fallen out of favor with games) and
pretty much was only supported by Roland and Yamaha gear, in which case
you'll get either GS or XG extensions anyway.


-Eric
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.libsdl.org/pipermail/sdl-libsdl.org/attachments/20070710/3f935310/attachment.htm