Songs to MIDI
Turn a GoatTracker 2 song into a Standard MIDI File: one MIDI channel for each SID voice, the notes where GoatTracker's player puts them. Play the file with any synth, or drop it into a DAW and give the voices new sounds. The song is read and converted in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
1. Pick a song
Or one of SIDOU's four showcase songs:
2. Download
What is in the file, and what is not
- Voices: one track and one MIDI channel for each SID voice, channels 1 to 3 (1 to 6 for a GoatTracker Stereo song, whose second chip has voices 4 to 6). Every note has velocity 100: the SID has no velocity, and an instrument's volume is its envelope, which is not exported.
- Pitch: a note is the row's note plus the orderlist's transpose, as the tracker shows it. What an instrument's wavetable does to the pitch (arpeggios, fixed notes such as a drum's pitch sweep) and the pattern commands that move it (vibrato, slides) are not followed. A drum written as noise at a fixed pitch shows up as the note on its row.
- Timing: the player's own: speed (ticks a row), funktempo, tempo commands (the global and the voice's own), the orderlist's repeats and loop, and the gate timers. A note starts on the call where the player starts it and ends where the gate falls: on a key off, or one gate timer before the next note's row (GoatTracker's hard restart), so a note is a little shorter than its row. A legato instrument or a tone portamento changes the pitch without a new gate: the file ends the old note and starts the new one at the same tick.
- One pass: each voice plays its orderlist once and the file stops where it comes round to its loop point. A song with several subtunes has a menu; each is its own file.
- Tempo: one tempo for the whole file, so that every note lands on a whole MIDI tick exactly (a MIDI tick is a twentieth of a player call, 1 ms at 50 Hz). A beat is the song's rows per beat (4, or what the song says) of its average row length: 6 ticks a row at 4 rows a beat is 125 BPM. A song that changes speed keeps its notes in time, but its rows no longer sit on the DAW's grid after the change; the changes are written as markers in the first track.
- Not exported: the sounds (waveforms, envelopes, pulse width, filter), the chips' setup, the effect slots, the parameter locks and the rest of SIDOU's own settings. The file is the score of the song, not the sound.