This is intentional. MIDI music is generally passed on to a MIDI device in Windows, which will generate a sound unique to it. A Roland Sound Canvas will make a completely different sound from that of a Yamaha synthesizer. Perhaps you've connected a MIDI module yourself with custom sounds. Windows does not know (or care). DOSBox doesn't know. If you want to record MIDI music, hook up the output of your MIDI to the recording input of your sound card (or, if your sound card supports it, set it to record MIDI output [sometimes called "what you hear"]) and use a separate recording program.

yes. that is correct.
There is no solution as it's designed that way.
midi is send to your operating system and not emulated, so hence it makes no sense to store that in an avi

set your soundcard to monitor sound output then use microsoft sound recorder and record it as a wav file? or does this not work with midi music?

It should. It depends on the soundcard and midi output device (on-card and softsynths such as the EMU8K/10Kx, MS DirectMusic GM synth, S-YXG, Virtual Sound Canvas should be easy to record, but external midi synths require some form of soundcard input) but in most Creative Labs cases set the input to "what you hear" and in most other cases to "stereo mix" to enable recording of midi output as wav.

Ok, so I'll try to record music separately, and then mix wav files into one... not bad idea. Thanks.

Btw, I didn't know Dosbox send it to OS... I thought it emulates it always, even when my soundcard is capable to play such midi. My soundcard don't have OPL3 midi, so maybe Dosbox emulates it, and thats why it is captured, but during general midi Dosbox don't emulate it.

Warrax wrote:

My soundcard don't have OPL3 midi, so maybe Dosbox emulates it, and thats why it is captured, but during general midi Dosbox don't emulate it.

OPL 2/3 doesn't count as MIDI in Dosbox, as it's a completely different hardware interface as compared to real (MPU-401) MIDI. OPL is always fully emulated, no matter whether your sound card supports it natively. Likewise, general MIDI is always sent to the OS to take care of, no matter what the capabilities of your sound card are.

Granted there are solutions available so far as recording audio separately, one big inconvenience is attempting to multiplex and then sync the audio and video into the AVI clip.

Perhaps in a later release of DOSBox, we could have a feature to capture the output of the audio stack of the host OS, and multiplex this on the fly as ordinary PCM audio? It could then be configurable in the dosbox.conf to capture only the output within the VM, or capture the output of all audio within the host OS.

It would be an otherwise trivial feature to add, but having it work on all platforms would probably be tricky.

Oh, and BTW for you win users: To record all audio you are currently hearing (regardless of your sound card,) open up your volume control (double click the sound icon in the systray) file > properties > select the "recording" radio button > check all boxes > ok > put the "select" checkmark under the first slider (different drivers have different names for it, usually "Stereo Mix")

Then go ahead and record it using e.g. soundrec (60 sec limit) soundforge, etc.

Strangely enough that was already mentioned and the thread's almost two months old.....

Avi actually has the capability to store midi information though 😀 Dunno how many players can actually handle, but okay

That would be interesting 😀
DirectShow could probably handle it if the splitter correctly demuxes the file...

Harekiet wrote:

Avi actually has the capability to store midi information though 😀 Dunno how many players can actually handle, but okay

And that is ultimately where the problem is, so you can't e.g. post it to youtube. Not only that, but if the person viewing it doesn't have an mt-32 emulator installed, or whatever the MIDI playback was intended for, then in some games that use MIDI sounds for effects as well as music (e.g. sierra quest games) you can miss much of what is going on.

well yeh there's not much to be done about that, unless you maybe include a bunch of software midi players in dosbox but those all need their extra data files if illegal mt32 roms or soundfonts. Much easier to have the host system handle it and can always use fraps then or something to record the output.

Harekiet wrote:

well yeh there's not much to be done about that, unless you maybe include a bunch of software midi players in dosbox but those all need their extra data files if illegal mt32 roms or soundfonts. Much easier to have the host system handle it and can always use fraps then or something to record the output.

I don't think fraps will record that unless its using d3d or opengl, will it? Thats what the documentation says anyways, unless I missed something. FWIW, fraps was what I tried first.

Seriously though, what's wrong with recording MT32 via line in or CM32L/Midi on Soundcard via stereomix/what u hear?

Seriously though, what's wrong with recording MT32 via line in or CM32L/Midi on Soundcard via stereomix/what u hear?

The sunchronising part, probably. Because starting capturing in dosbox and the sound recorder might be a problem. Though that CAN be circumvented if you can assign a different hotkey to the recorder program to start recording (with Autohotkey you should be able to do that just fine)

Dominus wrote:

The sunchronising part, probably.

Couldn't you do the classical clapperboard method? Start recording, then run some little DOS program that flashes the screen and clicks the PC speaker at the same moment. Then run the program you want to record. This should allow resynchronizing sound and picture relatively easily.

Of course it's even easier if this isn't needed at all, because the recording is synchronized in the first place...

dh4rm4 wrote:

Seriously though, what's wrong with recording MT32 via line in or CM32L/Midi on Soundcard via stereomix/what u hear?

I was pretty sure I made that abundantly clear...

AlphaWolf_HK wrote:

one big inconvenience is attempting to multiplex and then sync the audio and video into the AVI clip.

But I'll clarify it even further: This really takes some effort to do. Believe me, I just did it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upNbyBn4_kw

You have to actually play the video and audio separately, and look for cues in both the video and audio that give you a rough idea of what you have to cut, and where, out of both the video and audio segments. Then after that you'll actually need to take measurements in order to get any accuracy within 100 milliseconds, and if it is even off by that much it is still noticeable.

In my case it took about 5 minutes, but that was mainly because of the tools I have available (soundforge (not free,) and virtualdub,) and because of the shortness of the clip. Trying to do this with something like windows sound recorder and windows movie maker is not trivial at all.

So if somebody doesn't have these tools at their disposal, they don't want to buy desktop recording software, or they just don't want to spend that 5-30 minutes measuring and splicing video clips, that is where a feature like this would come in handy. If you really think having this feature would be a bad idea, then that's fine, but I thought I would mention it anyways.

If you're going to the effort of recording DOS games at all then having to synch them with recorded midi-as-wave soundtracks isn't really much on top. There are whole online shrines dedicated to the MT32 where people have spent countless hours recording, categorising and discussing the majority of game soundtracks.

There are also many wave recording apps that are just as free as DOSBox is and Audacity is probably the most recognisable of the lot. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

It's not that I think this feature is a bad idea at all. It's also occured to me that the devs could use the inbuilt GUS emu redirected to a file's output stream to do much the same. Sound studios and foley artists use AVI MIDI metadata for SMPTE encoding so that movie soundtracks can be accurate to within 1/100th of a second....

It's just that when you complain about having to put some of your own effort into to creating something I think it's a little out of order, especially when so many others before you have put in their own selfless effort to create DOSBox and have it allowed it to remain free to use.

Convenience is all well and good but don't let yourself be put off by having to put a little extra effort in.

dh4rm4 wrote:

It's just that when you complain about having to put some of your own effort into to creating something I think it's a little out of order, especially when so many others before you have put in their own selfless effort to create DOSBox and have it allowed it to remain free to use.

Woah there, I am not complaining at all, and I don't see how requesting a feature can even remotely be interpreted as a complaint.

Complaining would be e.g. saying "firefox sucks because it doesn't have tabs."

What I am doing is more along the lines of saying "hey, perhaps it would be a nice convenience to add tabs to firefox."

The firefox developers aren't going to insist that you shuffle around with multiple windows just because they put effort into it and you didn't.

By your logic they should change the "Request Feature Enhancement" tag in the firefox bugzilla to a "Complain About Firefox" tag.

I am not complaining about dosbox at all, rather the opposite. I think it works well. I only made that post as a request/suggestion as is common in all development circles, nothing more.

dh4rm4 wrote:

Convenience is all well and good but don't let yourself be put off by having to put a little extra effort in.

Then what is the point in even having a video capture in dosbox in the first place? Surely that is outside of the scope of being strictly an emulator. Why not just leave it up to the user to use a third party recording tool instead of having one built into the emulator? Convenience.

Truth be told, there is always more than one way to do anything with computers. If I had a list I made in a text file, and I wanted to sort it alphabetically, I could do it by hand (the long way,) or I close the file and run a 'cat list.txt | sort > list.txt' (shorter way.) Or what would be more convenient is being able to take two clicks into tools > sort if the text editor supported this (even shorter.)

That is what adding features to software is for. It makes software more useful. It is not about addressing complaints, that is more along the lines of what bug fixing is for.