Author Topic: Fixing (finishing) the FF7 PC midi files  (Read 5118 times)

Sacoglossa

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Fixing (finishing) the FF7 PC midi files
« on: 2017-05-07 19:18:59 »
The PC version of Final Fantasy VII was a weird port, using not-quite-finished code and assets in a few places, and having to rip data directly from the PlayStation version due to source assets being lost. One such unfinished area is the music; Every midi seems a bit unfinished, with key differences from the PlayStation PSFs. Now, I know that these days most people just use recordings of the PSFs for the music in the PC version of Final Fantasy VII rather than the midis, but the midis are still generally used as a basis for remixes, covers, re-orchestrations, etc.

Now, it's more than possible to rip and convert PSFs into midi using tools such as vgmtrans; I've used this for getting midis from FF8, 9, 10, etc. But for some reason, it can't rip from FF7. Meaning, accurate midis for FF7 don't appear to exist.

To see just how different the PC midis are from the PSFs, I set about manually converting a single track (the main battle theme), using the program AudioOverload to listen to the PSF one channel at a time. And, almost every channel had at least one thing wrong with it in the midi, and there were even instruments missing! The results of my labour (as well as a quick cover in FL-studio using this midi as a basis) can be found here:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/p0uebbc74xf9ram/FF7BattleFixed.zip

Now, FF7 PC has 98 midis, and while I've only looked at a few in detail, every one of them was wrong in some way. I don't think I want to do this for almost 100 midis; it wasn't a quick job! So please tell me that I'm missing something, and someone has already created fixed midis for this game?