FF7 MIDI Previewer
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Written by Ficedula (ficedula@lycos.co.uk)

Prompted mostly by a discussion on Qhimm's message board, this utility lets you preview the different midi's in Final Fantasy VII. Since you could easily extract them and play them in Winamp, it's more of an editing tool, so you can compare how the different midi packages sound on different output devices.

Requirements
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DirectX 7.0 or higher.
Final Fantasy VII.
Creative SF Manager (to use Soundfont loading).


Usage
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It should start up with the Midi and Soundfont directories set to the correct FF7 folders, if you've got FF7 installed properly. If not, you can just click the "..." buttons next to the directory names to change them.

Clicking on an LGP file loads its contents into the Midi File list. However, before you can play a file, you must choose an output device from the list. Double-click on one to activate it. Then you can double-click on a midi file to play it.

If the device you've got selected supports soundfonts (it says so in the list), then you can pick one of the soundfonts FF7 uses and load it in, to see what that sounds like. Just choose the soundfont from the list and click the Load button.

The SF Info button gives some basic information on your Soundfont setup (how much memory left, which soundfont loaded, etc.)


Options
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I didn't put many options in, it's just a small utility I wrote in a few hours. You can pass some parameters to it from the command line though:

FF7MIDI.EXE [-sfbank number] [-device number] [-ff7path foldername] [-sfont filename]

-sfbank number: Sets which bank to load soundfonts into. The default is 0, the synth bank. (NB: I KNOW FF7 normally needs soundfonts loading into bank 1, but DirectMusic ALWAYS uses bank 0 - on my computer at least. FF7 doesn't use DirectMusic; my programs do).

-device number: Sets a MIDI output device to activate automatically. To work out the number of a device, look at the list in the program. The top device is device number 0, next is 1, etc.

-ff7path foldername: Sets the FF7 path, if the program isn't finding it correctly due to a messed up registry, or similar. If the path has spaces in it, you'll probably need to put it "inside speech marks". The path must end in a '\'!

-sfont filename: Loads a soundfont in as soon as the program loads. It doesn't need a folder, it looks in the FF7 soundfont folder.

EXAMPLES:

FF7MIDI
	starts the program with default options.
FF7MIDI -device 1
	starts the program, and then activates output device 1 (SB Live!, on my PC)
FF7MIDI -device 1 -ff7path D:\GAMES\FF7\ -sfont FF7m.SF2
	starts the program, activates device 1, sets the FF7 folder to D:\GAMES\FF7, and loads the soundfont FF7M.SF2.



Comments? Bug reports?
Email me ficedula@lycos.co.uk
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