Quicktime 2 To Roland SC 55
Quicktime 2.0 Midi Info
Quicktime 2.0 for the Mac came out in 1994 and its midi instruments were licensed from Roland and their Sound Canvas midi instruments. However Apple only licensed 41 of the 127 Roland midi instruments, and 1 of its 7 drum kits. While you could still target one of the instruments Apple didn't license in Quicktime, Quicktime 2.0 would map the unlicensed instrument to one of the 41 licensed instruments inside QT 2.0.
For example, the instrument English Horn is one of the 127 Roland midi instruments, but doesn't exist in QT 2.0. Instead if a midi file attempts to play English Horn, Quicktime plays Oboe instead, which is the instrument QT 2.0 maps it to.
All of the instruments in Quicktime are based on the Roland Sound Canvas synths of the time, namely the Roland SC-55 and SC-33. The instruments sampled in Quicktime 2.0 are downsampled (8-bit 22khz) versions of what is on the Roland synths, with all effects like reverb and chorus turned off.
The Issue
A couple issues arise from Quicktime 2.0 only having a subset of the total Roland instruments. One is the obvious one that if you played a midi file under MacOS 7 and QT 2.0, any instruments used in the midi file that aren't part of Quicktime 2.0 will be replaced with one that is, in essence changing the instruments. The song won't sound correct.
The other is in the opposite direction, if you have a song that was made for QT 2.0, but happened to use one of the replaced instruments, if you play the midi file on actual Roland hardware (or Quicktime 3.0 which later contained all 127 instruments) the file will sound "wrong" compared to what you may remember it in QT 2.0.
This is a common issue with the game Marathon, as it was made for QT 2.0 but happened to use replaced instruments, which meant playing the midi files from it on a Roland synth will also not sound correct. I rectified this by changing the midi instruments in the songs to use only the ones actually present in Quicktime 2.0 so you could play it on any Roland midi synth and it would use the instruments you remember from the game.
This may also be an issue with other games as the Roland SC-55 was used as a "sound card" for many DOS/Windows games. Any of those ported to the Mac using the same midi instruments will sound different because of QT 2.0's limited sound font. But for those people who only had the Mac version of the game, playing those midi files on real hardware will sound wrong to them. Everything is relative.
Quicktime to Roland Mapping
While it is well known that Quicktime 2.0 only used a subset of Roland's instruments, I hadn't seen anywhere that actually mapped all the instruments out showing which were in QT 2.0 and which were replaced with what instruments.
As such I decided to run Mac OS 7.5.3 with Quicktime 2.0 and the Quicktime SDK to document this. The most helpful utility in the SDK is an app called "Grab Exerciser". If you run it and load and configure its musical instruments you will see a list of all Roland instruments. Instruments listed in italics aren't in Quicktime and are replaced with one of the instruments that are not italicized.
I went ahead and did all this mapping and made a Google spreadsheet you can find here:
This lists the Quicktime 2.0 instruments in yellow as well as the list of instruments that were replaced. If you have a midi file that you want to play on a Roland midi synth but only want to use the Quicktime 2.0 instruments, you can use these mappings to replace the instruments to sound like Quicktime 2.0.
Quicktime 2.5 Oddities
You may have noticed in the spreadsheet above that there are 17 extra instruments added to Quicktime 2.5. However these do not use the samples from the actual Roland instruments. These are simply still replacements from instruments already contained in Quicktime 2.0, usually just with variations on ADSR envelope.
Furthermore, some of the replacement instrument values changed between 2.0 and 2.5. For example, Dulcimer (Santur on Roland synths) was replaced with Rhodes Piano in QT 2.0. But in QT 2.5 Dulcimer was replaced with Acoustic Nylon Guitar instead.
This causes a couple issues. One is that while Quicktime says Dulcimer actually exists now as an instrument it doesn't sound at all like the one on Roland synths. Two is that if anyone had used Dulcimer in QT 2.0 and was fine with the replacement to Rhodes Piano they were in for a surprise when suddenly their instrument changed to Acoustic Nylon Guitar in QT 2.5 without warning.
Worst of all was the instrument Guitar Fret Noise. This was mapped to Electric Bass Fingered in QT 2.0 but in QT 2.5 the mapping was removed altogether. If you had a midi file that tried to use Guitar Fret Noise it wouldn't play any sound at all in Quicktime 2.5!
I wonder what Roland thought of this, that Apple was showing Roland's instrument sounds being available now in QT 2.5 but in fact they weren't. It's an odd move from Apple since around this time they had bought Emagic and Logic and were getting serious about music.
The drums in Quicktime 2.5 are a different story. Here there are new sounds added, they filled in most of the gaps in the one drum set they had in Quicktime. However Quicktime 2.5 got rid of the Room Kit, which is all well and good because while Room Kit was available in Quicktime 2.0 it was actually mapped to the Standard Kit, Room Kit never really existed in QT 2.0 even tho it said it did.
It should also be noted that it's perhaps even more telling that the "new" instruments in QT 2.5 weren't actually new because the "About" section for each instrument still said "1994 Roland" like it did in QT 2.0. The only change on the "About" screen was for the drums (which removed the date), and did in fact have new sounds added.
Tweaking The Sound
Quicktime 2.0 used downsampled instruments at 8-bit, 22khz. A Roland SC-55 midi synth uses 16-bit 44khz samples, which will sound much too "good" compared to what QT 2.0 used. As such if you want to get the same "feel" from a Roland hardware midi synth, do the following:
- Turn off all effects, especially Reverb, Chorus and Fat. Quicktime used no effects.
- Downsample the music to somewhere around 8-bit, 22khz. This can vary, not all bitcrushers or downsamplers sound the same and it's easy to overdo it (I pass my Roland SC-33 through a Yamaha SU10 on "Long -20%" quality and this works pretty well).
- Boost the low and high EQ, leave mids alone. Quicktime 2.0 had very boosted bass especially.
This won't get you exactly there since you are applying this to all instruments at once instead of individually like Apple did when they sampled the instruments for QT 2.0, but it'll get you much closer to a "Quicktime 2.0 feel".