Improve Your N-GAGE Mobile Sound Quality

The Symbian S60 and UIQ devices use a midi patchset by Beatnik which is built into the ROM.
If you are slightly musical you will be able to tell that this is a highly compressed and reduced patchset.

[Patchset: A file containing samples of the 128 midi instruments and drums needed to play a .mid/midi file.]

Larger patchsets (for a PC) generally have multiple samples per instrument as a piano sounds different in one octave to another.
Small patchsets (e.g. smartphone) can double up (e.g. a "steel guitar" might use the same as a "nylon guitar" to save space.]

This patchset is stored in read-only ROM memory at Z:\System\Data\Beatnik\ with the name "patches.hsb".

[.hsb files are Headspace Sound Banks.]

Although ROM cannot be deleted or replaced, the Symbian devices have a wonderful feature where if you put a file in a directory on C: with the same filename and directory path it will load that file instead of the one in ROM.

Therefore, you can upgrade your Symbian device to have a larger (and better sounding) patchset for playing MIDI files by copying a compatible HSB file to C:\System\Data\Beatnik.
(You have to create the Beatnik sub-directory first as it doesn't exist on C: by default).

The only place I've found to get HSB patchsets free so far is from Sun Microsystems as they also use the exact same format for their Java patchsets.

The default patchset in your Symbian phone is about 100-170k (depending if UIQ or S60 etc).

Midsize replacement (1.1mb):
- sounds more like a PC

1. Download the zip file
2. Extract
3. Rename .gm file to patches.hsb
4. Copy to folder C:\System\Data\Beatnik

Notes:
- I've found you don't need to restart the device for changes to take effect after you've restarted the first time. e.g. to go back to normal, just rename npatches.hsb in your C: drive to npatches-tmp.hsb(or any other name) and you'll have the built-in patchset back.
- There is a considerable delay in opening midi files as it loads the new patchset into ram each time.
- This could impinge on copyrights of the patchsets but I don't see how... just don't hold me responsible..!!

Attached Files

soundbank_mid.rar (1.04 MB, 125 views)

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t.h.a.n.x.........

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Sounds good.
Have anyone try that?

This was for Ngage Symbian7, not for Ngage app of Symbian 9!

it works on symbian 9 as well...

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z:\system\data\beatnik doesn't exist in symbian 9... And... nobody still uses Midi!

I Will Try It On My N-gage

Have anyone try this?

Can you find how to improved N70 sounds??

is it possible to put in ngage games without putting into the ngage starter thing? lik without starting the orange ngage icon on the phone? i guess tt way it's much easier to install and play! thx