Does anyone know if Doom and Doom II come with the original music for the games, or the refined music from when the games we re-released on Windows?

I bought a Doom pack on Steam a while back assuming it would have the more modern music but I was wrong. If this has the newer music I will buy in a heartbeat.

This is the first time I've read about refined music.

I assume that you are talking about Doom 95, which has no midi support and can only play mus files. At first I assumed that the difference you've mentioned were caused by Windows 95's midi synthesizer, but without midi support, that's no a possibility.

This version (and the Steam version as well) has the same music as the original version. The Playstation/Saturn version has completely different music composed by Aubrey Hodges.

If you use a source port, you can choose different synthesis options and different soundfonts. This can change the sound quite a bit…

Sorry if this isn't helpful…

If you are looking for the Doom music the way it was intended, look into the Roland SC-55 packs for the soundtrack. Not only was that device the gold standard for MIDI music back in the nineties, but was composed on it by Bobby Prince himself so it sounds the best and the way it was intended on it.

The sound packs work fantastically in ZDoom and GZDoom.

MIDI is many things. It doesn't require to use the standard MIDI file format, and really is a stripped-down MIDI file. Most games with a MIDI soundtrack in the nineties actually used some custom variant of MIDI as dictated by the sound backend they were using. For example, Miles Sound System used [url=http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=XMI]XMI, Human Machine Interfaces' sound system used or [url=http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=HMP]HMP, [url=http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Category:Formats_that_Output_to_MIDI]etc.[/url]

The point was that at the time there were many different types of sound cards and, before Win95, there was no single system-provided interface for sound and music output. So each game had to use its own sound system code, and generally it made sense to use one of the libraries that already existed and handled all that instead of writing your own. They had to be able to transform a series of MIDI-like instructions into, depending on which sound card they were working with:
- Actual MIDI instructions, for General MIDI cards
- FM OPL instructions, for Adlib/Sound Blaster cards
- Perhaps something else? There was no shortage of weird hardware in the era

MIDI itself was subdivided between various interfaces, such as , the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravis_Ultrasound]Gravis Ultrasound, and so on; as well as having to deal with different instrument mapping depending on whether you were talking to a General MIDI card, an MT-32, or something else. With some cards, you could load your own instrument banks instead of following a set standard of instruments, but again the way to do that varied depending on the card, a GUS did not use the same method as an AWE-32.


Anyway, all that said, there was never a more "refined" version of the soundtrack for the Windows re-release. It's all the same MUS files, and how they sound depends entirely on the backend being used. Perhaps when one played Doom in DOS they had the OPL backend, and then when playing Doom95 they heard them playing through the General MIDI backend, and then assumed the difference was in the game instead of the hardware.

My advice would be to try ZDoom because it allows a lot of choice for MIDI playback.

You're right. I should have been more verbose, but there is one thing that I don't agree with: Midi is Midi. It's a technical standard for communication between electronical musical instruments. There a many similar formats, but they aren't Midi. The instrument mappings aren't part of the standard and many hardware devices in the olden times didn't implement the standard correctly.

Sure. The point is that it's MIDI music even if it's not stored in the Standard MIDI File format -- what matters is not what's written on the hard-drive, but what's actually sent to a MIDI device (such as a sound card) by the running program. Doom uses MIDI music but doesn't use the SMF format; and most games of its era did the same thing.

For instrument mapping, as far as old PC games are concerned, there's only really two standards: MT-32 and General MIDI.

Doom 95 it is, thanks for the reply :)

Do you know if there's a way to get this version to sound like Doom 95? I'm sorry, an audiophile I am not!

It might not be that easy to make Doom 95 sound like Doom 95 on a different computer, because the actual music that you head was not generated by Doom, but by the operation system or even directly by your soundcard.

Did you understand our winding explainations of the basic problem? Doom stores its music as instructions (i.e. play this note on that instrument for some time) that are used to generate the waveform that you hear and not as a waveform.

I think you should try the other suggestions by SpooferJahk and Gaerzi first:
1. Listen to a Roland SC-55 version of the soundtrack.
2. Try different options in zdoom.