Why did they drop MIDI music?

[Martin Howe]

This is weird. The source code includes a table of MIDI music names for each level in SW, even though MIDI music is only used in the shareware version. Clearly, they were originally going to have MIDI music in the registered version and then dropped it for some reason, which is a pity as I much prefer it to CD music (for games) and it means you don't need to keep the CD in the drive when playing.

It wouldn't be hard to patch the source to use MIDI tracks if present, nor to collect Japanese-sounding MIDI tracks to replace the missing ones (the CD has the five s/w tracks as goodies, though the game doesn't use them), but I'm curious about the decision iself. Anybody out there know/suspect a reason why they did this?

[Dr. Kill]

they didn't include midis cause they thought they were dated.

[Rellik66]

The problem with MIDI is that it sounds different on different hardware, especially between soft-synth and hard wave table cards. So it makes sense to use CD audio so you can hear it as the composer intended.

Anyway, once JonoF includes MP3 and/or OGG support in a future build of JFSW, sombody should write a script that rips the CD tracks into MP3s/OGGs to be used with the game.

[Dr. Kill]

don't forget about the cd fix that is already out... oh wait, that's for the old version