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Canyon.mid

canyonmid.com

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Re: Canyon.mid

#161

Post by sersi »

pixelpoet wrote: post #154
ascagnel_ wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games are now infinitely more complex -- I can run an improved version of Ultima VII (1992) on a device that fits in my pocket, while the original wouldn't have run on this (it required a 486 and even the latest possible Tandy systems maxed out at the 386), and that's not even getting into stuff like Factorio or Satisfactory.

Gentle reminder that Ultima VII was probably the best period-relative RPG until Baldur's Gate 3, even considering Neverwinter Nights and Dragon Age :) No words for how this game blew my mind back in those days...

Personally I'd put Planescape: Torment in consideration but yes Ultima VII is great.

Re: Canyon.mid

#162

Post by ale42 »

browningstreet wrote: post #106
swat535 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Illustrator for example, on a very recent PC. I can't figure out why it takes so much time to load and it's so heavy. It's not even an Electron app...

Re: Canyon.mid

#163

Post by reconnecting »

psychoslave wrote: post #159
deathanatos wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first funding round for a startup. "Series A", "Series B", etc. (… although there are sometimes "seed" rounds that precede a series A, or even pre-seed rounds … like everything else, it's complicated & messy. But hopefully you see the metaphor the parent was trying to paint.)

Are there good resources to learn about this?

Perhaps you can learn more about this from executing the following command:

echo "https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=44286820" | cut -d'/' -f3

Re: Canyon.mid

#164

Post by xp84 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #144
stevage wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Modern computers do not have integrated sound synthesis hardware whatsoever, there has been no point in shipping that since the start of the 21st century. Unfortunately, that does mean that for playing legacy General MIDI content, users are stuck with poor quality software implementations like Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth and the (modern successor of the) QuickTime synthesizer, which were designed for slow computers…

Thanks for the inspiration to dig this up for comparison:

https://youtu.be/fWnTYkCSZfA

Although I have to admit the cheesy versions do sound more familiar to me because I certainly had the most cheapo-grade sound hardware in any 90s PC I had access to.

Re: Canyon.mid

#165

Post by darkwater »

Disposal8433 wrote: post #7

You 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.

I had a completely different experience. The moment we played Monkey Island for the first time after installing our brand new SoundBlaster-compatible cheap soundcard, bought with the money a couple of early teenagers can have, well, it was GLORIOUS. I still remember it vividly 30+ years later.

Re: Canyon.mid

#166

Post by reconnecting »

reconnecting wrote: post #81
brookst wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.

And what if this isn't nostalgia, but rather a feeling in people that correlates with external pressure? U.S. debt in the 1950s was well below $1T, in the 1990s it was something around $3T, now it's $36T.

In other words, I believe at some point there will be a social study explaining that what was mistakenly taken as nostalgia in previous generations is not the same feeling in post-90s generations, simply because the world started collapsing faster and some major economic indicators are objective proof of this - actual accelerating decline rather than just romanticizing the past.

Re: Canyon.mid

#167

Post by Bluecobra »

brudgers wrote: post #45
badc0ffee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file In the case of canyon.mid there is because it was composed for a specific midi instrument with a particular set of timbres. Or to put it another way, it’s music and therefore complicated.

I think the OP was referring to the difference in synthesizers. It sounds a heck of a lot different on an MT-32 compared to a Sound Blaster: https://youtu.be/0j4uywdNq44

Re: Canyon.mid

#168

Post by opello »

kristopolous wrote: post #156
theletterf wrote: post #50

The creator of Canyon.mid, George Stone, was interviewed here: https://pixelatedaudio.com/canyon-mid/

his story reminds me of Elwood Edwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfrrif_sUOI

In the side bar was 'You've Got Mail' Voice Elwood Edwards Dies at 74[1] from 7 months ago. Among all the nostalgia from the MIDI sounds in here that was a bit of a downer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ7EkDFl_3s

Re: Canyon.mid

#169

Post by agos »

p1mrx wrote: post #11

I'm slightly impressed that the video (3.4 MB) is only 100 times larger than the original MIDI (33 kB)

a good quality soundfont is easily more than 3.4MB! But maybe back then nobody was using a soundfont that big
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