[GZD 4.7.1] Wrong instruments in EAWPats

[NightFright]

Currently playing Auger;Zenith with Timidity and EAWPats, I noticed the title music of that mod sounded different in GZDoom and Russian Doom. While patches are 100% identical and both ports use Timidity, GZDoom is using piano instead of choir in that title track, sounding a lot worse/weaker. It's like it's missing something and even GUS Emulation (with regular GUS patches) sounds better.

This makes me wonder if other songs or music rendering in general might be off in GZDoom to some degree when using Timidity. When trying common soundfonts like 8mbgm.sf2 or masquerade55, it became clear quickly that Russian Doom gets EAWPats playback right while GZD doesn't.

Tested with: GZDoom 4.7.1 x64, 4.8pre x64 (VS 2022 build from Github), Russian Doom 5.1 x64

If instructions are needed to get EAWPats working in GZDoom and/or Russian Doom to make the comparison, I'll gladly provide it if requested. I might be trying to do this with older GZDoom builds to see if it stops happening at some point.

[Graf Zahl]

Can you please attach the affected MIDI here? Without that being readily accessible there's little chance of any solution. Nobody likes to hunt down mods and extract files for them to analyze a bug.

[NightFright]

Alright. Should be this one.

What I noticed now is when I play back this MIDI in a standalone player with the same soundfont I use in GZD for testing, it sounds f'ed up as well. Ingame it sounds quite different.

BTW: I see that Russian Doom has implemented gusgonna.wad which fixes vanilla Doom's GUS instruments, but I guess that can be ignored here since EAWPats use their own instrument mappings, anyway. One way or the other, loading gusgonna.wad together with the mod wouldn't fix the music, as expected.

[NightFright]

So... the issue might be a more general one after all.

Ninety-Six reported in the Duke4 forums that in LZDoom, certain songs (not all) might "forget" instruments after a while or have "less depth", i.e. effects like reverb are missing, possibly also wrong instruments like I experienced. All this in LZDoom and not with EAWPats, though...

UPDATE:
Went back until v3.3.0 and EAWPats would still sound weird with that specific track. Maybe it's the MIDI file itself after all?

[NightFright]

So... it looks more and more as if this isn't a GZD bug after all...

Ninety-Six found that different soundfonts break on certain songs while others won't. Microsoft GS doesn't break with the "Auger;Zenith" title, but it does if Timidity is used. In case of Memento Mori II, it's the opposite for MAP02 (Timidity works, MS GS fails), but then both mess up MAP03's music.

Now I guess it would be interesting to know what's exactly happening in those MIDIs and if there's anything that can avoid the soundfont/GUS patch failure.

[Graf Zahl]

Who knows. MIDI is not my specialty, so I'm a bit at a loss here.
If someone could take that music and isolate the bogus instrument I might have a chance getting somewhere with a debugger.

[NightFright]

If it's any comfort: It's highly unlikely GZD is to blame for this, especially since it even happens in pre-4.x builds. I checked everything since Timidity got integrated and the wrong instruments would play all the time.

Curious though how the usage of a certain instrument (if that's what this is) might break so many soundfonts.

[Graf Zahl]

How does it play in external Timidity? If there has been an error it would have been while porting the player, so all internal variants would be the same anyway.

[NightFright]

Is it possible it is related to Capital Tone Fallback (CTF)? Some synths play wrong instruments or remain silent when an invalid bank is referred. Some songs might screw around with some sound banks so much that synths "give up" unless CTF is there as a backup.
Bassmidi supports CTF natively, but if you use another MIDI driver (e.g. Timidity), it might be a problem.

[Graf Zahl]

Never heard of it. Interestingly I have encountered a few MIDIs that just don't play right with EAWPats. Most of the time it was enough to use another soundfont but not switch synths.
That's the main reason for the $mididevice directive in SNDINFO.