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Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

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Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#31

Post by SCdF »

cyberferret wrote: post #15
pasta wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I remember this was done on an Apple computer. In the command line you could do this with they 'say' command. The parameter -v is used for the voice. And I think "Fitter Happier" is 'Fred'. say -v Fred "fitter.happier.more productive" Edit: other sources say it was 'Bruce'. But I don't have an Apple, so I can't check.

My go to favourite is 'Karen' for the Australian accent. Her voice is far more natural sounding that most of the others I've auditioned, and I use her as the default and pepper all my deployment scripts with 'say' commands now.

As a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly!

She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that's something ;-)

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#32

Post by stordoff »

mrkrabo wrote: post #27
slau wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half life did the same, as I recall, as did many other titles. I assume that the CD simply had two "tracks," with the audio CD "partition," if I may call it that, being the first. This allowed the game developers to play music during the game using the CD-ROM drive's hardware audio decoding (remember that small molex that went from the drive to the soundcard?) without impacting the game's performance. These days, it'…

It will boggle your mind then to know that most games still have their sounds in .wav files, even the music sometimes. It's very rare for a game to have its music compressed, unless the hardware can decode it on the fly (think wma on the xbox, or adpcm on the ps)

It's a balancing act thought - shipping audio as WAVs trades performance for disc usage, which can also be an issue (e.g. Titanfall shipping with 35GB of uncompressed audio, which is a pain to download).

Also, I know a fair number of games that use Vorbis for music, so not sure I would say it's very rare.

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#33

Post by mrkrabo »

stordoff wrote: post #32
mrkrabo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will boggle your mind then to know that most games still have their sounds in .wav files, even the music sometimes. It's very rare for a game to have its music compressed, unless the hardware can decode it on the fly (think wma on the xbox, or adpcm on the ps)

It's a balancing act thought - shipping audio as WAVs trades performance for disc usage, which can also be an issue (e.g. Titanfall shipping with 35GB of uncompressed audio, which is a pain to download). Also, I know a fair number of games that use Vorbis for music, so not sure I would say it's very rare.

It is common for music to be compressed, that's true. But sfx, almost always you'll see wavs for those. I don't think cpu usage is a concern anymore, I believe it's about latency. That's why music is compressed. It doesn't matter if music takes 10 ms to start playing, but 10 ms of latency for a pistol shot sound is not acceptable.

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#34

Post by reitanqild »

cyberferret wrote: post #10

Very cool - brings back memories of loading programs from a cassette tape on an old TRS-80 back in high school, and watching those " " stars blink in the top corner. I believe the cassette players we used used to also play the signal as audio at the same time it was uploading to the PC. Then, after a few minutes: "Hammurabi, I beg to report..."

I remember pirating games using my moms double casette deck in the kitchen.

It played the signal as audio while copying.

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#35

Post by dingo_bat »

laumars wrote: post #19
axaxs wrote: post #16

Reminds me of the original Quake game on CD, which, if put into a normal CD player, would play through the NiN soundtrack.

That's not an easter egg. That's just a dual format CD - you can burn them yourself really easily (I used to write these as MP3 CDs so systems that didn't support MP3 could still play a subset of the tracks). It was a really common practice to put in game music as audio tracks on game CDs. Dreamcast GDs also work a similar way where you can play the game audio in a regular CD player despite the data track being forma…

Yup, I was amazed when I put my Moto Racer [0] game CD into my CD player and all the background songs started playing! I was just, in my naiveté, trying to see if the CD player would be able to convert the game binary data into music.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_Racer

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#37

Post by jxramos »

SCdF wrote: post #31
cyberferret wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go to favourite is 'Karen' for the Australian accent. Her voice is far more natural sounding that most of the others I've auditioned, and I use her as the default and pepper all my deployment scripts with 'say' commands now.

As a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly! She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that's something ;-)

You just answered a question I pondered earlier today as I watched the MacOS X demo I linked to above somewhere. And that is to the question if a native speaker would recognize the synthetic speech as unnatural. As the video progresses it lands on international languages such as Arabic and Chinese among other things. To my ear and my best memory of how those languages sound the synthetic versions came out pretty convincing. It made me think about a concept I've had about a test to language recognition: if a native speaker were to speak gibberish in their native tongue would an outsider to the language recognize it as gibberish or assume it was vocabulary in that language.

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#38

Post by mrmondo »

SCdF wrote: post #31
cyberferret wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go to favourite is 'Karen' for the Australian accent. Her voice is far more natural sounding that most of the others I've auditioned, and I use her as the default and pepper all my deployment scripts with 'say' commands now.

As a New Zealander, I'm not an Aussie but I am still disappointed she can't say "Strewth" properly! She gets 'arvo' and 'stone the crows' right though, so that's something ;-)

Hahaha yeah, I’m a kiwi living in Melbourne and at first before Apple had added New Zealand to Siri’s input localisation I had it set to Australian and it’d get everything wrong, I found that instead setting it to British English it worked a lot better and then better again when New Zealand was added, regardless I keep Siri’s voice set to British Female as it sounds the most natural to me.

For those that aren’t familiar with Australian vs New Zealand ascents - they’re /very/ different despite how close the countries are physically located to each other. When spoken New Zealand English has more of a British / South African - ‘rounder’ sound, where Australian is generally (especially as you move north or west up the country) more nasal and closer to American English with more emphasis on E rather than O if that makes sense.

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#39

Post by mrmondo »

frou_dh wrote: post #7
hkmurakami wrote: post #3

Pretty sad they're calling this an "app". If it's dated to 1996, clearly it's a "program"!

NeXTSTEP was around in the early 90s and used the file extension .app

Oh that’s a good point you have there and app is just an abbreviation of Application which I think philosophically was a subset of Programs / Programmes.

Re: Radiohead album hides an app that only runs on an '80s computer

#40

Post by lokedhs »

frou_dh wrote: post #7
hkmurakami wrote: post #3

Pretty sad they're calling this an "app". If it's dated to 1996, clearly it's a "program"!

NeXTSTEP was around in the early 90s and used the file extension .app

The Atari ST operating system used .APP as well. This was in 1985.
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