FF8 music, possible to replace the default midi with mp3s?

[Zellpropell]

Hello, I was wondering if there was a way to make the music in FF8 better.
I have windows vista 32 and a creative sb x-fi sound card, the music is awful when I play ff8 and thats a shame because I love the ff8 sountracks.
I tried DL'ing Samuel Slight's Final Fantasy VIII DLS and the quality got better but it sounds like a lot of instruments are missing when I play.

Is it possible to have mp3s play instead of the midis in-game? I managed to get the game running with nice graphics by using the FF8 launcher etc, the only thing preventing me from playing now is the awful sound quality.
If someone could help me figure out how to make the sound quality better I would really appreciate it, thank you.

 

[Zellpropell]

I read that a lot of people are satisfied with Samuel Slight's DLS, I must be doing something wrong because when I DL it and extract it over my files in the music/dmusic directory and replace them the music ingame actually sounds worse than before.
Sounds like a lot of sounds are missing when I play.
Im not sure what im doing wrong exactly because I thought I did everything the readme told me to, does anyone know what I might be doing wrong? because when I listen to the samples from the page I downloaded Samuel SLight's DLS from they sound great and nothing like what I get ingame.
Please, any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

 

[Olie]

if no one answers you its probaly coz u need to use the search, but idk anything about modding i just work them ingame lol.

 

[Archer Mac]

You're not hearing all the instruments because of Vista's sound system.
You probably noticed that instruments are missing when you use "Microsoft Synthesizer" as a music device..which you have to use in order to get any good sound at all and for Samuel's DLS.

Soooo...to the point,you can fix it!
You have to place an "older" dmsynth.dll in the folder where your game is installed and that's it.
I uploaded the file here.

I have Vista 64bit and it works great.

An easy way to test it is with FF8MIDI from the main site www.qhimm.com
When you apply Samuel's DLS files and try to play "Balamb garden" with "Microsoft Synthesizer" selected as the device I guess you won't hear any sound at all for like 12 seconds.
If you put the dmsynth.dll file in the same folder as FF8MIDI and then start it you should now hear the sound as it should be.

So...once again,dmsynth.dll has to be in the same folder as the main game .exe or any other program/game you intend to use it with.

edith, X-Fi ...well...I never had an external sound card but try this dll stuff,I hope it will help

As for the main topic question it would be really nice to exchange the sound with mp3s ... ...

edit: may 2011.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think Windows 7 got an update which fixed the overall broken midi support in it (which was done for Vista SP2 but not for Win7 for some time after it's release).

So an updated Windows 7 or Vista SP2 shouldn't run into any problems with Samuels DLS.
If for any other reason you're running Vista/Vista SP1 then just put this dmsynth.dll to where your FF8.exe is.

 

[Zellpropell]

Thank you so much Archer Mac that solved my sound issue, now it sounds a hundred times better!