Midi freezes in all 3 products: TGF, MMF and MMF2

**Aloan** · 9th April 2009, 10:52 PM

I'm wondering if anyone has an answer as to why is there a Midi Freeze? a midi freeze is what happens when a midi song is about to begin "in game"? the gameplay freeze happens for just a couple of seconds but it's "of course" an unwelcome and distracting experience. This doesn't happen with digital audio though. Is this something that can't really be fixed? I wished to have only midi music in my game to make it small in data size, but this freezeness is just too obvious. What do you think? I've seen this happening in all the games I played from people who make click games that has midi music in it.

**Mico** · 9th April 2009, 11:25 PM

Same thing happened to me with a tiny midi file. Converted it to a wav and it then played in the game without a pre-play pause - but of course added to the game's file size.

**Aloan** · 9th April 2009, 11:43 PM

Exactly! I can obviously understand that technicaly a wav file is just a single file (so a single internal instruction is carried out, which is "play the wav") and that for midi, many instructions are carried out at once such as how many instruments to play, what instrument to play, how strong the notes are played and so forth. I was just wondering if this is a fixable problem. Because if it were, I would favor midi files, since they express a more retro feel to your games and for large exploration games this is marvelous, because it shortens a crazy huge amount of a game's file size. Well, I'm going to try this. Every time the game hero touches the edge of a screen level and the application loads another screen level to be played, I'm going to have MMF2 wait a couple of seconds before it loads the midi song instead of running it together with the new level. Who knows this might be the answer. I don't know. I haven't tried that yet

**Shawn** · 10th April 2009, 04:25 AM

Well, you can always record the audio stream of your midi file playing, and save it as an .ogg file to keep it small.

Also, another thing to keep in mind when using pure midi files is that depending on the user's midi sequencer on their PC, it might not sound the same if they don't have the midi instruments you used.

You can save it as a low bitrate ogg file. This keeps the file size tiny, and it plays identical across all computer systems. Won't have the hiccup either. I noticed this myself when I used to use midi files.

**Dines** · 10th April 2009, 11:20 AM

This is kind of fixable. The problem lies in that MMF cannot run the midi files as a resource internal to the memory, it has to save it as a temp file and then pass the file path to the MIDI engine which will play it.

To resolve this, you can simply bundle the music with your game and play it using an extension. You can also pack the music into your app as a binary and then extract it into the temp area yourself via the events, at a time more convenient to you (such as during a loading sequence at the beginning of the game). Then you tell it to play the midi from a file, rather than playing an internal midi.

That make sense?

**Mico** · 18th April 2009, 04:40 PM

Makes lots of sense, thanks Dines.

Possibly more valuable to know how MMF treats midi and therefore simpler to avoid and just convert to another format. However, really good to know.

Perhaps ClickTeam could make available a chunky help file on file types handling?

**dragonguy** · 18th April 2009, 04:47 PM

The Freeze when MMF2 loads an .Ogg is significantly smaller than the Freeze when MMF2 loads an .Mid, plus you can replace some the instruments with better ones but I have a Roland so it would be hard (if you don't the right place) to beat Midi on my machine.