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Yes, a bit tardy, but thanks for the effort.
Today I sent a version of MA3 with an experimental MIDI soundtrack to the Alpha Testers. They hated it. This is not much of a surprise, since I tried it on my laptop just before I sent it, and I hated it, too. I had composed it on my main machine, which evidentally has some pretty good MIDI voices, because it sounded rich, mellow, and realistic. But on the laptop it was tinny, raspy, and unrealistic.
So now I have to make a decision regarding which direction to proceed. I'm not quite ready to give up on MIDI, since the byte-savings are off-the-chart compared to any other format.
Morgan suggested that I package my own MIDI samples with the program, instead of relying on whatever oddball sounds everyone's sound card comes with. This would probably work, but I'll have to research how much space the samples would take up. That's what I did when I wrote the music for Defender of the Crown II, the CDTV and CD32 opening fanfares, CD32 "Dinosaur Demo", and a bunch of other stuff. (Some of that is still out there on YouTube, but with severely muffled sound, jerky timing, and pixilated graphics.) But in those days (wow - it's over 20 years ago!) I wasn't concerned about filesize, since I was streaming the audio off a CD.
So, it's a question of:
1. Scrapping the whole idea of music.
2. Keeping the User Playlist, but with no default track.
3. Rolling up my sleeves and really taking the MIDI thing seriously.
4. Going with a much shorter MP3 file as the default.
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