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Oh interesting! I didn't know making them stereo would prevent them from panning. I will have to re-think which ones I would like to make stereo.
But your directions on adding stereo samples makes sense, I will try that ASAP.
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So I have made some interesting progress! My primary reason for replacing mono sounds with stereo ones, was to mod ports of an old game called Doom 64. Either the composer of the soundtrack, Aubrey Hodges, or the person who did the first PC port, Samuel Villareal, did the music compositions in an interesting way.
Instead of using midi to do panning, the instruments in the sound font definitions were panned. Since the game originally was on the N64, it could have been a quirk of the N64's sound system. Anyway since it was only instruments that was panned, I could attenuate the volume in the left and right sample definitions (I used the rule of constant power). Which allowed me to have stereo samples, yet retain how panning worked in the original game.
Here's my rendering of the soundtrack with my edited soundfont: https://youtu.be/L3Z7FEwknBQ
And the full version of my mod: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/114534/
Thank you for your help! And also thanks to Polyphone for making the process of editing SF2 files easy!
Now I just need to figure out how to save DLS files (as one of the Doom 64 port uses that for music). -
And it just keeps getting more and more interesting... I'm hobbying in a very similar way you're working, I'm extracting old videogames soundtracks directly from their ROMs and converting them to midi, just to do a little uplifting on their quality! I'm playing around with Genesis, SNES, and I'm working on N64 soundtracks too, so if you want my help to have the original N64 soundtrack of Doom, I'm happy to help! The extracted midis have everything in their place, all necessary CC messages, pitch bends, note ons and their durations, but their instruments are "scrambled", that is, you'll have to define them individually. But for every game I tried, inside their midis they have assigned only one instrument per channel, which greatly helps you when you have to manually assign the instruments.
As for your observation on N64 music handling, you would be surprised. In my experience, these classic consoles can actually completely handle the basic midi mechanisms, especially on N64. At least in Genesis and SNES, their only limitation on this matter is that they can't handle polyphony on a single channel, and they can handle only 8 channels, but N64 operates at full MIDI standard. If you get a piece of a midi extracted from a ROM, you'll see what I'm saying!
Looking forward to the result of your works
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Fortunately I was able to ride on the work of others (Kaiser of Doom 64 EX / Nightdive studios) who were able to extract and assign the midis of the Doom 64 soundtrack. The composer of that soundtrack, Aubrey Hodges, has somewhat become a legend in the community for his foreboding style. But a lot of people don't realize he also did the Quake 64 soundtrack, which has a very similar style.
The doom 64 soundfont only takes up like 50 preset slots. So my pipe dream would be to combine the Quake 64 presets into a Doom 64 soundfont. This will let the Doom 64 ports of GEC Master Edition and Doom 64 Retribution support Quake 64 music, but also I could make combinations of the instruments to make more midis as well.
Any help or directions on getting the Quake 64 midis/soundfont extracted would be greatly appreciated! Plus I help out with music in the Quake community sometimes and they would love to have more music to work with.
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