Note: It sounded differently on different sound cards because their wavetable/sound fonts/MIDI chips were different, so there was no canonical, universal rendering of MID files.
Canyon.mid
61–70 of 214 posts
Re: Canyon.mid
#62You remind me that I didn't have a sound card at the time and I played all my games (mostly LucasArts) with the PC speaker. For me, the MIDI versions are too boring as they lack the "raw electric power" of the speaker that I loved for years.
What exactly was the difference between PC speakers and MIDI? Why do we no longer need a MIDI device today to play the “correct” sound?
As others have already said, MIDI is a spec and does not contain any actual sounds. General Midi's big thing was probably its defined list of sounds but that was really only a naming convention.
The great thing about MIDI is that it is easily routable to any number of things (physical instruments, samplers, etc.).
Being able to listen to Sonic 2 - Chemical Zone with a combination of a Minimoog Model D and a Jun-6 (basically a Juno-6) is unbelievably fun.
Re: Canyon.mid
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your YT/Winamp/whatever volume isn't at 100%, then what you're doing is: 1. generate audio signal 2. reduce volume of that signal, losing information because it's quantised 3. take that volume-reduced signal and boost it right back up again, but now with the lower bits destroyed You can make this effect as bad as you like, e.g. turn it down to 1% and then amplify by 100x... but why?
Apps shouldn’t even have local volume controls. It’s an OS function.
Yes and no.
Clearly there is a need to give different volumes to different apps, so you can have quiet background music while a timer app is louder, or Zoom is louder.
Ideally there would be an OS-level mixer to independently set the volume of each app. I believe Windows has this, Mac definitely doesn't. And for convenience, an app's local volume control would exist, but set it at the OS mixer level, so you don't have them competing with each other.
But without this, an app does have to have local volume controls.
Also, it's important to be able to set gain as well, i.e. turn the volume "above 100%". For those YouTube videos that for some reason are only 5% as loud as other videos. Even better is if you can set the gain per-video so that it won't be absurdly loud and clipping when you move on to the next video.
Bonus points if an OS or media player ever gives the option of a dynamic compressor, so you can actually listen to those amateur podcasts where one speaker's microphone is 10x quieter than another's. Or listen to the quiet parts of classical music recordings even in the presence of background noise.
Re: Canyon.mid
#64Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is a silly question. It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities. The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and…
I don't think OP is asking whether we should give up looking for advances in astrophysics. OP is asking "why did we add all of these freaking popups and theme tweaks? They're distracting me from using my computer to make advances in astrophysics!"
I'd say try Linux.
Re: Canyon.mid
#65Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers. It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
> It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
Is it? I think there's a common tendency to "stop exploring" cultural artifacts very deeply as we age, but not everyone shares this trait. Some people continue to value novelty in those areas well into old age.
For my part, treasured artifacts of my youth don't impede my ability to appreciate new things. And indeed, I think many videogames I loved dearly have aged poorly.
Re: Canyon.mid
#66Anyone have the other SoundBlaster era demo .MIDs at hand? I think there was...Self Control? rhythm.mid? A couple others that I can't remember?
These are 1992-era MIDI files that came bundled with MIDISoft Recording Session. Note that they contain both "Base" and "Extended" tracks in the same file, so there will be piano notes on channel 16 that are supposed to be percussion. A MIDI player such as Falcosoft Soundfont MIDI Player will detect those kinds of songs and automatically mute channel 16. (There is actually a way to mark channel 16 as a percussion channel, but the people who made those midis in 1992 didn't know about it)
Re: Canyon.mid
#67Some previous discussion in 2021:
Re: Canyon.mid
#68Ahh ... retro. The many ways by which the past beckons us.
All right. Apropos the retro theme, here's a Web page dedicated to my Apple II program "Electric Duet": https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/
The gory details: the Apple II had a simple TTL output connected to a speaker -- crude, not meant for music, and certainly not with two voices. Did this stop me? Read on.
I created an assembly-language player that switched the TTL speaker driver's output at 8 kilohertz, then created two musical voices by controlling the pulse width of the 8 KHz clock. So two voices, two notes at once, from a TTL driver.
Here's a sample of the music Electric Duet created, on an Apple II, in 1981: https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/music_tracks/prelude.mp3 -- press the play button.
That's retro defined.
Re: Canyon.mid
#69Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.
This is more commentary on the nature of personality and taste than of computers. It’s human nature to think of familiar things from our youth as the height of achievement. That was the time of the best music, the best movies, the best culture, the best sports, the best everything. No matter if you were born in 1950 or 1990.
I don't think nostalgia is the only factor here. If it were, then no young people would be interested in old computers, which I have found not to be the case.
Re: Canyon.mid
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want Midi to render consistently across devices, you are “Significantly Out of Luck.” The audio sounds like it sounds because Microsoft Licensed Roland’s GS Wavetable. Without that you lose timbral information.
That’s not the Microsoft/Roland sound.
Canyon.mid on my windows computer is.