Microsoft DirectMusic

Microsoft DirectMusic
Developer:	Microsoft
Header:	Custom
Content:	Notational
Instruments:	Internal
Target Output
Released:	1997-??-??
First Game:	Shogo: Mobile Armour Division (W32)
Extensions	*.sty *.sec *.sgt *.dls *.per *.sjm

Microsoft DirectMusic was introduced with in DirectX 6 and discontinued not long after. Its goal was to provide somewhat interactive music, where songs could have different sections and the game could seamlessly transition between them depending on what the player was doing at the time.

Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (W32) was originally slated to become a technology for DirectEngine, a game engine included as part of DirectX. While this never eventuated, it resulted in the game making extensive use of DirectX technologies, being one of the few to use DirectMusic.

Using Shogo as an example of one way of using DirectMusic, each song was divided up into four sections, different in mood, energy and pacing. Shogo named these A (for "ambient") to be used in quiet parts of levels, C (for "cruising") used in normal level areas, H (for "hard driving") used in high-action sections and S (for "silent"), used when starting or stopping playback. When the player moved to a particular part of the level, the game would finish the current "segment" (approx 5-10 seconds in length), then play a short transition segment (A to C, A to H, C to H, etc.) and then continue playing from the new section.

Each section had a number of different segments (usually around 8 to 12) and these could be played in any order to make the songs sound slightly different in each level. Furthermore, each segment had a number of variations within it, so playing the same segment twice wouldn't always produce the same sound. These variations usually consisted of additional and/or missing backing instruments.

The instruments for the song were stored in DLS format, which was an interesting choice as this was the era in which the Sound Blaster Live! was predominant, and it had hardware acceleration for the equivalent SF2 format. But as it did not support DLS, DirectMusic was never able to be hardware accelerated beyond what could be done with DirectSound.

Players

(Category)

• Winamp - Windows only, with the addition of Peter Pawlowski's DirectMusic plugin
• libdmusic - an open source attempt at playing DirectMusic songs on modern platforms

Editors

(Category)

• DirectMusic Producer - Windows, official utility released by Microsoft

Converters

(Category)

There are no known converters for this format.

Games

(Category)

Released	Title	Sample
1998-??-??	Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (W32)
1998-??-??	Blood II: The Chosen (W32)

How to Obtain

As there are so many DirectMusic files, they are usually located in a folder within the game's data files.

Links

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectMusic - Wikipedia.