Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not working

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SketchMan3
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Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not working

Postby SketchMan3 » Thu Sep 27, 2012 12:11 pm

Hi, wow, it's been awhile. Just recently getting back into FoF, and I ran into a snag. I have some songs that I made with a midi editor, not using EOF or anything else like that. The notes.mid simply has a single track with only the notes in Expert mode. No events. No multiple PARTS, no other difficulties.

Whenever I try to load these songs, I always get a "connection lost: unable to load database" message.

Does FoFix only play songs with EVENTS, multiple PARTS and multiple difficulties? I think the reason I quit FoFix in the first place was because my songs weren't working on it. Come to think of it, even the songs I made in EOF with only a single track and single difficulty don't even work.

Can anybody help?
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby acrox999 » Fri Oct 05, 2012 12:12 pm

Oh hey SketchMan, welcome back.

Back on topic, have tried loading your MIDIs with the latest EOF? You might be able to do some modifications with it and export it to support the latest MIDI specifications.
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby SketchMan3 » Fri Oct 12, 2012 2:57 pm

acrox999 wrote:Oh hey SketchMan, welcome back.

Back on topic, have tried loading your MIDIs with the latest EOF? You might be able to do some modifications with it and export it to support the latest MIDI specifications.

Thanks for the welcome :)

Did EOF ever sort out that jumpy timing thing? That'd be my last resort. I noticed that all the songs that I made with EOF looked slightly jumpy in the game screen compared to songs made directly in a midi editor (or any other editor, actually), even though for some of them I simply set a BPM at the beginning and never had to adjust it later in the track. I'd prefer to avoid that with songs that aren't already jumpy. The last EOF version I used was version 5.

I'm using Anvil Studio and Jazz++ for midi editing.

So, I managed to get some of the songs working by trial and error (copy-pasting+transposing to other difficulties, making sure the midi file is the right configuration, renaming the track, setting instrument and channel to 1 or 0, and correcting a bunch of inconsistencies between Anvil Studio's midi format and that of Jazz++ which was a headache, lol), but is it a known issue that basic bare-bones single instrument single difficulty songs don't work in FoFiX?

Edit: Also, I'm on a Windows 7 machine, and sometimes FoFiX crashes on startup, and then I have to go to my FOFIX and Songs folder and uncheck "Read Only". Don't know why I have to do that repeatedly...
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby raynebc » Fri Oct 12, 2012 6:23 pm

EOF has been developed heavily during the years since the 1.5 release, and especially the MIDI handling has been refined to the point where they create MIDIs that pass even Magma's standards for making Rock Band Network charts. Lately though, I mostly use EOF to make pro guitar upgrades and play them in Rock Band 3. While I can say the focus since 1.71 has mostly been pro guitar/bass functionality, there have been too many improvements to list here. I recommend you to check out the latest beta release, which you can find a link to in my signature.

During the past year or two, FoFiX has remained mostly slow in terms of development while another game called Phase Shift has been growing in capability. While it doesn't support users singing vocal tracks, it can play any other tracks FoFiX can, as well as 4 lane dance charts, pro guitar/keys/bass/drums.
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby acrox999 » Sat Oct 13, 2012 1:15 am

SketchMan3 wrote:
acrox999 wrote:Oh hey SketchMan, welcome back.

Back on topic, have tried loading your MIDIs with the latest EOF? You might be able to do some modifications with it and export it to support the latest MIDI specifications.

Thanks for the welcome :)

Did EOF ever sort out that jumpy timing thing? That'd be my last resort. I noticed that all the songs that I made with EOF looked slightly jumpy in the game screen compared to songs made directly in a midi editor (or any other editor, actually), even though for some of them I simply set a BPM at the beginning and never had to adjust it later in the track. I'd prefer to avoid that with songs that aren't already jumpy. The last EOF version I used was version 5.

I'm using Anvil Studio and Jazz++ for midi editing.

So, I managed to get some of the songs working by trial and error (copy-pasting+transposing to other difficulties, making sure the midi file is the right configuration, renaming the track, setting instrument and channel to 1 or 0, and correcting a bunch of inconsistencies between Anvil Studio's midi format and that of Jazz++ which was a headache, lol), but is it a known issue that basic bare-bones single instrument single difficulty songs don't work in FoFiX?

Edit: Also, I'm on a Windows 7 machine, and sometimes FoFiX crashes on startup, and then I have to go to my FOFIX and Songs folder and uncheck "Read Only". Don't know why I have to do that repeatedly...

FoFiX does support single instrument/difficulty charts. I'm using the latest EOF beta, I say it has improved a lot. My latest 2 charts are converted from dB chart file with EOF. It worked out very nicely, no errors. I'm not sure what you meant, by jumpy. Did you mean the timings are off at certain parts?

About the error you're getting, maybe try clearing your scores cache in your Songs folder? There should be a simple script to do this. Haven't used FoFiX for a long time now.
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby SketchMan3 » Wed Oct 24, 2012 2:00 pm

acrox999 wrote:
SketchMan3 wrote:
acrox999 wrote:Oh hey SketchMan, welcome back.

Back on topic, have tried loading your MIDIs with the latest EOF? You might be able to do some modifications with it and export it to support the latest MIDI specifications.

Thanks for the welcome :)

Did EOF ever sort out that jumpy timing thing? That'd be my last resort. I noticed that all the songs that I made with EOF looked slightly jumpy in the game screen compared to songs made directly in a midi editor (or any other editor, actually), even though for some of them I simply set a BPM at the beginning and never had to adjust it later in the track. I'd prefer to avoid that with songs that aren't already jumpy. The last EOF version I used was version 5.

I'm using Anvil Studio and Jazz++ for midi editing.

So, I managed to get some of the songs working by trial and error (copy-pasting+transposing to other difficulties, making sure the midi file is the right configuration, renaming the track, setting instrument and channel to 1 or 0, and correcting a bunch of inconsistencies between Anvil Studio's midi format and that of Jazz++ which was a headache, lol), but is it a known issue that basic bare-bones single instrument single difficulty songs don't work in FoFiX?

Edit: Also, I'm on a Windows 7 machine, and sometimes FoFiX crashes on startup, and then I have to go to my FOFIX and Songs folder and uncheck "Read Only". Don't know why I have to do that repeatedly...

FoFiX does support single instrument/difficulty charts. I'm using the latest EOF beta, I say it has improved a lot. My latest 2 charts are converted from dB chart file with EOF. It worked out very nicely, no errors. I'm not sure what you meant, by jumpy. Did you mean the timings are off at certain parts?

About the error you're getting, maybe try clearing your scores cache in your Songs folder? There should be a simple script to do this. Haven't used FoFiX for a long time now.

I do know that it supports single instrument/difficulty charts, but figured there were some extra commands that EOF and other such editors added to the midi files that FoFiX depended on, that wouldn't be created when using a simple midi editor.

Thanks for the tip about clearing the scores. That could be the problem, as the songs that don't work often don't show any scores, even though they were played years ago.

As for the "jumpy" part. I noticed (and I think some other people noticed, too), that charts created with EOF, for some reason, didn't scroll as smoothly as, say, charts created with a midi editor, the built-in editor, Freetar, or Score Hero(? I think that's what it was called...). It's very minor, but it was noticeable on a subconscious level by my siblings as well.
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby acrox999 » Wed Oct 24, 2012 2:13 pm

After reading your post few weeks ago about the jumpy issue, I tried with one my dB chart converted to midi with EOF and one dB chart to midi using that converter tool from ScoreHero. I noticed that with EOF converted midi, it's a little bit jumpy, like you said. I don't know what might cause this. Does EOF export with extra info or something that might cause the midi to be a little heavier?
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby SketchMan3 » Wed Oct 24, 2012 2:21 pm

If I recall correctly, I think NewCreature once mentioned that EOF handles midi-timing/ticks/whatever in a unique way. I don't think he went into detail, though. I'm not sure if it's related to EOF's ability to do mid-track tempo changes, but I think it has something to do with the timing being constantly calculated rather than just set at the beginning. Don't quote me on that, though.

That was one of the reasons that some of the "old-heads" didn't get into EOF, if I'm not mistaken. I couldn't understand how they could complain about EOF charts being "terrible" until I realized they weren't talking about the note placement, but the performance of the midi files. But I still love it. I was hoping that issue would be addressed in all these years, though :X
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby raynebc » Wed Oct 24, 2012 4:17 pm

I still have no idea what either of you are talking about. If by "jumpy" you mean the chart playback lags or seems to be off in terms of timing in FoF/FoFiX, but it's perfectly fine in everything else (re-imported into EOF, opened in MIDI editors, Phase Shift, Rock Band, etc.), then that's FoF's fault. EOF uses a time division of 480, which I believe is what all Rock Band charts use, perhaps FoF has performance problems with that. The only way I know of where EOF could be improved to write a more optimized MIDI is if it used running status to shave off a mere byte here or there for consecutive note on or off events, but this is extremely minor and shouldn't be anywhere near enough bloat to be unusable.

If somebody could provide me with the MIDIs for the EOF-converted db file and the chart->MID converted db file, I can check to make sure EOF's timing is accurate. Until then however, I can only imagine EOF is doing what it's supposed to, as every time I've examined EOF's MIDIs, they were spot on.
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby acrox999 » Wed Oct 31, 2012 4:38 am

Sorry, I didn't noticed this thread in my email. But I'm not sure though, it's not really a big deal to me, because the jumpiness isn't that much, or just the game lagging a little bit.
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby acrox999 » Wed Oct 31, 2012 10:04 pm

Alright, this what I have. MIDIs labeled as notes-eof.mid and notes-db-chart2mid.mid. Both converted from dB.

http://www.mediafire.com/?k19ho531g4tcjr3
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Re: Old single-instrument single-difficulty songs not workin

Postby raynebc » Thu Nov 01, 2012 3:01 am

Taking a look at the MIDIs, there must have been some number rounding that caused two anchors in the EOF version to be minutely (0.000881 BPM) different from the comparable anchors in the dB-converted MIDI. The note positions in each were close enough to be identical, mostly within a delta tick or so (about 0.25ms) among both MIDIs. The tracks besides PART GUITAR were removed from the EOF MIDI though so I couldn't compare the others. If you still have the original .chart file involved, I could test with the current build, but so far I don't see any big issues on EOF's side of things.

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