XG MIDI delay...

[xeriouxi]

Hi!

On FF7 PC, when the XG MIDI is selected, it seems to always take a second or two to load, and this can get annoying, especially when a MIDI is played over an FMV. Does anyone know how to fix, or at least speed up, this MIDI annoyance?  

xeriouxi.

[Aaron]

Hmm, that doesn't happen to me.  What sound card are you using to play the MIDI?

[Rubicant_II]

This is exactly the reason why I don't use yamaha XG synth with ff7pc. It always lags at the beginning of the song, unconditionally. I just love the whole bounce of materia lag in earithdd.avi, whereas the music off-cue for the whole thing. It sounds retarded. The XG synth sounds great, but it always freakin' lags. Never been able to fix it on my sblive value.

[ye-roon]

i've never had lag with yamaha thingy

i selected yamaha thingy cause the sound resembles the PSX sound the best wich i played b4 the pc version

[The Skillster]

The Fact is that there IS delay, due to the fact XG is software decoded,
the faster your machine the quicker it can load the softsynth

[xeriouxi]

Hi!

I have a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon. Shouldn't that be fast enough, considering the game was released for something like a 233MHz processor?  

I'm asuming that there is no way that I can uncompress or speed up the loading of the XG files, right?  

Oh, and I have a SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 soundcard.  

xeriouxi.

[Rubicant_II]

The actual loading of the files is fine. It's just that the software responds really slowly to start and stop of music being played. It's always lagging behind 1 second at all times.

[xeriouxi]

Hi!

Well, that would happen to the best-sounding MIDI! Just everyone's bad luck!  

I seem to remember that extracted XG MIDI files also have a second lag. Could it be possible to edit the MIDI, remove the lag at the start, and splice it into the original XG file?  

xeriouxi.

[Aaron]

They don't have a second lag because there is an empty second at the beginning of the file... they have a second lag because it takes that long for your XG Synth to get ready to play them.  And if it is a whole second, then that is way worse than I was getting back when I played the game on my 400 MHz laptop.

Anyway, I have an Athlon XP 2400+ and the S-YXG50 4.2 and the lag is so low that it pretty much doesn't matter.

[halohalo]

When I hear XG midi songs in FF7pc, I prefer my AW744pro (with YMF744 chipset) soundcard. It is better than S-YXG100 softsynthesizer.

[ye-roon]

edited my above post... needed to say PSX not PC ..

[shambhala]

You can try setting "DirectSound" option "On" under the "Custom Setting 1/2" tab. This should helps reducing the response time.
Select <Start -> Programs -> YAMAHA SoftSynthesizer S-YXG100 -> S-YXG100 setup>

[Rubicant_II]

Even then it doesn't fix the lag...

There's just no fix to it...

[Srethron Askvelhtnod]

Well, if it's just lag that is the problem, then I *might* have a solution. If you like the XG midi, give it a try.

What you need:
-Awave
-FF7 Music

1) Use Awave and record the XG Midis to MP3s.
2) Set up FF7 Music to use them.

This is another shot-in-the-dark fix, so yeah, might not work. It's actually something I tried myself, though, back in the day. And, yes, it worked for me, although I was doing it because XG Soft Synth ate up so much memory and slowed down FF7 incredibly bad (but the music wasn't delayed for me.)

[Rubicant_II]

Not a bad idea at all. I considered doing that not too long ago, but I figured it would be way too much work and little payoff. But if anyone who is willing to try it has a nice and free weekend, you can probably get it done within a day or so as long as you concentrate.

[Goku7]

The truth its, the delay is built into the midi files.

The reason?  SysEx messages.  It has ALWAYS been standard procedure to have a blank measure or two when using SysEx, in order to let the synth process the SysEx before needing to play anything.

Of course, it is totally possible to have it process the SysEx on-the-fly (meaning without using blank measures), but then you get the effect of having all the controller settings change while it is already outputting sound, and sometimes that can sound undesireable.

I get the delay sometimes on my hardware XG synth (HaloHalo: yes, it's the YMF744 chipset).  However, the only place I've noticed it is in the victory fanfare.  Everything else is timed right.

[xeriouxi]

Hi!

I think I forgot to mention that I don't own, or have installed, the Yamaha program for the XG MIDI. I don't know what it does off the top of my head, but if I were to get the version for XP, would it still be slow at loading?  

Oh, and just out of curiosity, how exactly would I go about disabling the SysEx stuff?  

xeriouxi.

[Goku7]

Hi!

I think I forgot to mention that I don't own, or have installed, the Yamaha program for the XG MIDI. I don't know what it does off the top of my head, but if I were to get the version for XP, would it still be slow at loading?  

To be honest, it depends on how good a sound card you have.  If you ran the XG synth on an old sound blaster 16 would take longer to load than if you ran it on a shiny new SBLive!/Audigy, TB Santa Cruz, or anything else that supports full DirectSound Hardware Acceleration.

Basically, when used in FF7, it boils down to how fast the card can initialize DirectSound's Primary or Secondary buffers to start outputing sound.  This is why there is a longer delay when using DSound to output instead of using standard Wave Playback, because it first has to initialize DirectSound.

Oh, and just out of curiosity, how exactly would I go about disabling the SysEx stuff?  

It depends on what you mean.  If you mean to disable whatever effect the message has on the way the MIDI sounds, then you can nullify 95% of it by unchecking the "Variation" box in the synth's config.  The message would still be contained in the MIDI files, but the synth will just ignore them.  However, as there would still be a blank measure or two in the beginning of the files, the "delay" that you percieve would still be there.

If you mean to remove the SysEx message completely...well, that would require a re-editing of the MIDI files, which IMO isn't worth it.  The special effects activated by SysEx messages are what gives the XG specification its power.  Without it, you can't access any of the cool Variation Effects that FF7 can use to its advantage.