Hello, here I am with yet another wacked-out article about music in games!

OK, you're about to find or create some music for your game, but you don't know which format of music you'll use or make. Are you gonna use MIDIs or MODs? Which one is easier to make? Which one offers more possibilities? How big will the music be? We shall discover more about this in the following lines! We'll see more about each of these popular song formats separatly and then compare them each other.

MIDIS

PROS: The good news is that making good midis doesn't require much equipment or knowledge, you just need some freeware midi program, your mouse and your keyboard. It's easy to get the hang of making midis, since you have few tech details to remember; just remember about the velocity, pitch wheel, panning, volume and modulation. If you can lay notes correctly on a staff then you're already on a good way ahead in midi composing. Midis are pretty easy to make and doesn't take much time to make. They are also pretty small, and rarely will a midi shall be larger than 100k, unless the song uses a lot of note events and controller events.

CONS: Midis do make the creation of certain musical styles pretty hard because of the few available patches in there. There'll always be some time where you'll ask "How can I make that song without having this single instrument which isn't in the available patches?" Just because the midi sounds great on your computer doesn't mean the midi will sound correctly on other people's computers, too. Each midi sounds differently on all possible soundcards, and your songs may play in a totally wretched fashion on another's people computer, or won't play like you wished it did. The midi looping delay in the kilk program can also be annoying to some people, too.

MODs

PROS: Provided you have the skill, you can basically do everything with a MOD. Songs of incredible quality can be created within a tracker if you're willing to spend time on that. It plays the way you want it to play on every computer, no matter which soundcard is used. With patience, you can emulate musical styles a lot more easily than in midi format provided you have the right samples handy. You can even create a dynamic soundtrack by making different tunes in a same module then use the DMC2 or ModFX object to skip to the proper pattern whenever a certain event occurs, like a battle or a conversation, without having to load a new song. If you have Unreal or Deus Ex installed on your computer, make sure you check a few of the modules to see what I'm talking about. Loop points in your songs are also easily setupable.

CONS: If you're getting a liking to tracking, this may start costing you some serious money if you choose to buy sample CDs or even a professional synth, but that's only if you're willing to use original samples for your songs. You can always rip samples from other songs and archives, but then I hope you have a fast Internet connection so you can afford to download that stuff, because you'll download a LOT. Tracking is a lot more time-exhaustive and it's harder to make good songs out of the tracker due to the huge amount of commands you need to use and remember. MODs can also crank up your game size a lot if you use many of them (unless the MODs used in your game are chiptunes using extra-low quality samples )

Alright, now that we know what are midis and mods, let's decide which one of them shall go in your game now.

MIDIS OR MODS?

Here comes the really tricky part now; do we use midis or mods in the game? Here's a couple of things that you gotta think about that may help you choose.

- Is your game a small, quick game which can be finished playing in under 10 minutes? If so, shove the MODs out of the game, since it'll only give a longer, unjustified download time and that pisses people off. I once downloaded a 1.3 meg game which had one minute worth of gameplay, and it was that big thanks to a big music file. I wasn't happy.
- For larger games, I'd recommend using MODs. If your game really is good and shall take time to complete, you can afford to give a bigger download in order to offer a better soundtrack to the player. FactorX immediately comes to mind as an exemple. The game was cool, and the music really added to the game (even though they were taken from various MODs sites)
- For medium-sized games, you should either only use midis or use a blend of both. You may use MODs in important scenes of your game to put more emphasis on them and make them feel more important.
- Of course, work with the type of music you have more ease with. You don't need to do all the stuff I'm talking about, you know. If you're more familiar with midis, put more emphasis on midis. Same thing goes for mods.
- MODs have a step over MIDIs for having access to better samples, but this doesn't mean that MIDIs aren't good too; just take some time to hear Eternal Daughter's soundtrack. Remember that a good melody goes before the song format to be used.
- If you wanna use mods and wanna keep the game size as small as possible, remember this! You can downsample your songs a bit in order to save space. Downsample each sample of a song once and the song's size is already 2 times smaller. Plus there's not much quality loss, neither. (as long you don't downsample too much, heh )

Here was my long and useless rant about midis and mods. Each of the two formats are useful in their way and contribute well to the game's music. If you've asked yourself which song format you'd use in your game, I hope this article somehow helped you choose.