After a fair amount of scrounging and saving (and one very dead credit card), I finally purchased a fairly high-end digital piano (Yamaha Clavinova CVP-307) for myself, decked out with USB, optical output, and the like.  So what was the first thing I did with it (after playing the hell out of it for a couple days)?  I input a couple midis from the FF7 PC game and let its quality sampling go to town!

I went through a fairly random sampling of different kinds of songs that sounded good and recorded them into my PC.  Without further ado:

1 - 10 - Fighting | [midi]
1 - 20 - Still More Fighting | [midi]
2 - 11 - Rufus' Welcoming Ceremony | [midi]
2 - 19 - Gold Saucer | [midi]
2 - 20 - Cait Sith's Theme | [midi]
3 - 12 - Fiddle de Chocobo | [midi]
4 - 01 - Shinra Army Wages A Full Scale Attack | [midi]
4 - 03 - Highwind Takes To The Skies | [midi]
4 - 09 - Sending A Dream Into The Universe | [midi]
4 - 18 - Staff Roll | [midi]

All MP3 Tracks (Zipped)
All Midi Tracks (Zipped)

Note: they're on my personal server, so feel free to download, but please don't post them around.  I'll probably take them down after a month or so.

Unfortunately, being the midis straight from the PC port of FF7, they don't loop and I was too lazy to manually edit them to do so.  If anyone would like to, or knows a place that has already done so, or if someone knows a place with smokin' hot midis (can midis even BE smokin' hot?) or XGs I might want to run through the keyboard, let me know.

Otherwise, enjoy!  (and comment!)

Mm, good ol' synthesized orchestra.

I'm not gonna bag on your piano, because we discussed it earlier, but that sounds like exactly what I'd expect from that hardware.

Thanks for the samples, though. ;D

I'm no musical tech-type, but I gather what's happened here is that the keyboard can take audio data and replace the various instruments with its own, higher-quality versions?

Sounds jolly good, whatever it is

I'm no techy either, but that's basically what MIDI is and does, right?

Yup!  When Squaresoft ported FF7 to the PC, they changed the songs from their harder-to-decipher Playstation format (Amber could explain this better) into vanilla, General Midi that sounds something like what they did on the PSX.

My keyboard can load up midi files and use its higher quality samples to play the same songs, and the result (imo) is something that comes out sounding even better than the originals! 

The only downside IMO is that the General Midi can't do as many proprietary tricks as a Playstation format made for a specific game (to my knowledge anyway), so comparing the PSX soundtrack, tweaked and fiddled with until it sounds just as Uematsu wanted to these twice-removed General Midi renderings might be a little unfair to my versions.  Play that midi version and then the mp3 and you'll see why I'm so happy.

Congratulation! AFAIK the PC version of FF7 had every track in 4 midi versions. You can get all of these at http://www.protoman.com/Music/Music/. BTW, you don't really need a high-end keyboard for this stuff, you can download a free Fruity Loops demo and some free soundfonts and achieve similar results.

Moses, very interesting...

Does anyone off-hand know the difference between the different versions (being that they are all .mid files)?  I notice one is "Yamaha Softsynthesizer" so maybe that will have different results.  I'll do a test-run of them when I get home.

FFVII PC included a custom version of Yamaha's XG software synthesizer (S-YXG70) that was tweaked so that the sound was very nearly the same as the PSX game if you used it. The XG format has some extensions to the MIDI standard. There's a wide variety of soft synths and sequencers out there, but Fruityloops is not the first that comes to my mind when making a recommendation.

Actually it has a lot of them. The the kind of control it gave to you was quite incredible in its extensiveness. The fact it never became a widespread standard made me hate MIDI.

There's a new system of "high resolution" MIDI, though I'm not sure if it's specific to this company or not:

http://zenph.com/midi.html

-Joshua

Heh, high-resolution MIDI... how cute.  Looks like they just added a byte here and there.

Anyway, I'm a little sad that Creative's 3DMIDI format didn't take off.  The ability to pan MIDI to the rear and control things like azimuth is something that should've been part of the original MIDI spec.  Alas, it will probably be forever NRPNs.

I still should probably pick up an X-Fi one of these days. :(