Anyone needing some .orc files (from Voyetra Digital Orchestrator Pro) converted to .mid?

• May 7, 2021 - 21:03

Having been so greatly helped recently by the kind forum members who converted my Sibelius 4 files to MusicXML for me to import into MS, I'm now in a position to offer a limited bit of assistance to the odd individuals here who have some .orc files (from the excellent but long-obsolete Digital Orchestrator Pro sequencer by Voyetra) that they want to be converted to .mid, retaining all the bank select and program (instrument) changes, which are routinely stripped out or ignored as 'sequencer-specific data' by the odd programs that do manage to read the .orc files (various ones can if the filename extension is changed to .rmi).

I found that although I'd saved most of my compositions from DOP as both .orc and .mid, a minority of them hadn't been saved as .mid from DOP, and I'd made my .mid versions years later from Sibelius 4, which could read .orc files. But I recently found that those particular .mid files had all bank select and program change messages stripped out, and I really need those intact in all the basic .mid files of my works.

Eventually, increasingly tearing my hair over the lack of current options for converting the relevant .orc files (apart from one professional online service that quoted me c.$60 per file for that conversion!), just yesterday I started the struggle of getting a VirtualBox system set up to host a downloaded copy of Windows 98 SE, finally succeeding and getting the latter installed, and then a big struggle to find a way that actually works to share files between Win 98 and my host OS (Win 10). I finally succeeded this evening and quickly got each of those .orc files successively loaded in DOP and saved as .mid, and then the batch of them copied into my regular folder from my ex-DOP .mid files, with all MIDI messages intact.

Having done all I need with that DOP installation now (it's too clunky for regular use in the VM), I'd just uninstall VirtualBox now - but it occurred to me that this setup could assist the odd friendly mortals in this forum, so I'm keeping it on my computer for a month from today in case it might be of assistance for the odd smallish batch of conversions.

I can't spend a lot of time on that, so any batch of .orc files would need to be reasonably modest in size, as DOP has no batch conversion facility.

Also I must warn that although DOP does save .mid files with all bank and program change messages, for some weird reason it had corrupted most of the bank numbers, mostly by adding 2 to the first digit of numbers, so that bank 05 becomes 25, 15 becomes 35, and so on. That means that, as I proceed through my project of re-recording all my works with up-to-date hardware and instrument sounds, my first step for each work has to be to go through each track's bank select messages and manually correct each.

Clearly anyone else using files saved from DOP would have the same issue and have to do that annoying task for each file with embedded bank select messages - unless of course they're not using soundfonts and are using sound libraries that use keyswitches instead of MIDI program change messages.

You can contact me privately or post here if you think I may be able to assist - but that's only up to 7 June, after which I'll remove VirtualBox from my system.


Comments

Thanks for the helpfulness, I don't have files in that format but it's an appreciable offer and if it had escaped anyone interested, it's now back in evidence. ;-)

Hi Philip,
I have several .orc files I created in DOP years ago. I'm so much interested in the midi info as I am in getting the audio stems converted to mp3 or wav. The midi in the files were just basic drums, which I can recreate if necessary. Is there ant chance you can help me with this? Please let me know, thanks!

Best,
Ryan

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