Touhou 'Imperishable Night' - MIDI out to Yamaha PSR-E313

Demonstration of Imperishable Night set to MIDI music in the Options, playing through my Yamaha keyboard. The keyboard's display lets you see the notes as they're played (the notes on Channel 1 of the MIDI, so sometimes nothing shows up).

I'm having trouble getting it to set up the channels properly, i.e. what should be PERCUSSION comes out as PIANO. That is, until I start playing a MIDI file on the keyboard itself - at that point, it sets up its channels properly. That means it's restricted to playing the Touhou music using instrument sets from the MIDIs I have stored on the keyboard at the moment.

So what I'm doing is getting the Imperishable Night music playing on my computer as MIDI, it goes to my keyboard, then I start and immediately pause another unrelated MIDI on the keyboard itself, to force it to set its channels up properly. This means you're hearing the Touhou music using different sets of instruments than intended to (the instruments of the unrelated MIDIs). I use a few random unrelated MIDIs, so you get to hear the music in a few different sets of instruments.

When I unplugged the MIDI cable, it was to prove that it really is playing in realtime. I want to connect the MIDI out of my computer to the MIDI in of my computer, and record, to 'extract' the MIDI files from the game. But I need to get some little adaptor to allow me to connect 2 male cables to each other.

EDIT: Yet again, I spent a long time making sure the video and audio were in sync, but YouTube never fails to mess it up. Sorry about the sudden uselessness of this video. Hopefully it sounds okay...

EDIT 2: Because several people have wanted to use their keyboards as a MIDI output device and not known exactly where to start, I'll try to explain...

You need to connect your computer's soundcard to your keyboard via a MIDI cable. This means you either need a soundcard with external MIDI out (such as what I use, an M-Audio Audiophile 2496), or you can connect your own wires to the game port on your soundcard (there are tutorials online for doing this, but I can't help you, sorry).

Then you'll just need to set that soundcard to be the default MIDI device (Control Panel, 'Sound(etc)' on XP, 'Multimedia' on 98, no idea on Vista ><). My keyboard listens to MIDI input from power-up, and many other keyboards are probably the same. ;)
Then use any program which uses MIDI (this and other games, or even simply a media player with a MIDI file to test it).

EDIT 3: You can find ripped MIDI files from Touhou 6, 7 and 8 at "mirsoft.info".

Category:

Music

Tags:

• touhou
• imperishable
• night
• Japanese
• MIDI
• keyboard
• yamaha
• psr-e313
• 東方
• channel
• instrument