For those who remember... :) man I miss when things are simpler, slower, maybe more manual, more tedious, but more configurable, more buggy, but more creative. I understand we got here through multiple step changes of improvements, but I'm just nostalgic - good memories!
Canyon.mid
131–140 of 214 posts
Re: Canyon.mid
#132I played the hell out of this midi file when I got my soundblaster 16 in the early/mid 90s!
Re: Canyon.mid
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apps take 10 seconds to load? Which apps, on what system? My whole machine reboots in less than 10 seconds. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a decade. I haven’t had significant data loss from a failed drive or a corrupt machine in.. I can’t remember. Even DaVinci Resolve is ready to run in a few short seconds. This is all on a machine I bought 6-8 years ago. I reboot my phone and watch and laptop when I think…
Gimp. On any system.
Notice how everybody replying says "less than 5s".
As if anything done on a machine going through 10_000_000_000 (10 Giga) instructions per seconds should be anything but perceived instantaneous, for it's finite lifetime human user.
Re: Canyon.mid
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice. There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file as it's just note and tempo data. But many people probably associate them with the OPL2 synthesizer chip on AdLib and early SoundBlaster cards. [1] Now that we have high fidelity digital sound output on even the cheapest computers/devices, at least 44 kHz, at least two channels, and at least 16 bits per sa…
I find it very painful that modern computers still have such terrible midi chips, and modern operating systems don't come with decent midi synthesisers. It's a real hassle trying to get reasonable sounding MIDI on either windows or macOS.
Re: Canyon.mid
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped, apps now take 10 seconds to load, memory usage is maxed, games crash and people needed to reinstall their OS so frequently that Microsoft literally added a "reset PC" option.. You can argue that software does much more than before, sure I agree but no one asked for so much bloat and features in every day apps. My note taking app doesn't need AI.
>To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped
Part of my job when I was a youngn, was rebooting the Windows NT server running the software router because packets stopped forwarding for the entire net cafe.
Re: Canyon.mid
#136Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but... I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000". Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card,…
VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supp…
The late Lonnie Falk would have been happy to see that PCM did such a good job of covering Radio Shack's computers that it is thought of as Tandy's magazine. Falsoft's line of magazines covering that area probably added at least a few million to Tandy's bottom line.
Re: Canyon.mid
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hav…
> Mac definitely doesn't
https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic and others.
Re: Canyon.mid
#138Please please please NEVER disable video player controls. Like a fool I didn't lower my system volume, and got blasted with maximum volume of the YouTube video.
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?
Because in order to get the best dynamic range while listening to diverse music, you need to detect the loudness of tracks and albums and adjust the gain of each track/album accordingly. In order to have room for the music player to adjust the volume higher for quieter tracks, you need to apply a "pregain" to lower the volume overall, while turning up your speakers to compensate. This solves the problem, but by doing this, your music player will generally have a lower volume relative to all other applications on the system, meaning that it generally will be desirable to turn down application-specific volume knobs accordingly.
More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuEtQqC-Sqo
Re: Canyon.mid
#139I remember some of the songs that came with the Sound Blaster, like this one: https://youtu.be/eqU4CkbK1X0
What a step up it was over the bleeps that came out of the PC. Like going from B&W to color TV. Advances like that were commonplace back then.
Re: Canyon.mid
#140The Zip Drive on the table to the right, tho ...