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Canyon.mid

canyonmid.com

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Re: Canyon.mid

#191

Post by boudin »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #185
Sharlin wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, of course, because it could play square waves, you could bitbang it to play digitized audio using PWM. Sounded terrible, and super CPU-heavy (so not useful in games), but still.

There were two games that I remember had pretty good sound on the PC speaker, one was a golfing game which had like bird whistles and voices, the other was a 2d side scroller with voice acting, iirc it said "jesus is here!" when you picked up an extra life or something.

There was also Le Manoir de Mortvielle which had a speak synthesis throughout the whole game and a recorded music as intro, all on the pc speaker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXB8AddxBgM

Re: Canyon.mid

#192

Post by Intermernet »

tripflag wrote: post #78
dleslie wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and sharing midi files was commonplace before mp3s took over. Mid and mod, what an era.

mods are still alive, and crazier than ever -- proof that 4 channels is all you need! https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=ma-205456

Oh that's beautiful. You made me a happy person.

Re: Canyon.mid

#193

Post by Intermernet »

b112 wrote: post #142
esafak wrote: post #139

I 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.

Wow, almost a match for the C64. I miss early PC wars. Now it's all just the same. Maybe we'll have fun again with quantum computing.

I can imagine some 14 year olds in the playground:

"The Qamiga has 16 qubit sound dude!"

"Yeah, but it uses quantum annealing! You can hear the entropy loss in the higher frequencies!"

Re: Canyon.mid

#194

Post by b112 »

Intermernet wrote: post #193
b112 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, almost a match for the C64. I miss early PC wars. Now it's all just the same. Maybe we'll have fun again with quantum computing.

I can imagine some 14 year olds in the playground: "The Qamiga has 16 qubit sound dude!" "Yeah, but it uses quantum annealing! You can hear the entropy loss in the higher frequencies!"

This is quite amusing to me, considering the Amiga had a low pass audio filter, you could toggle on and off via software (not sure if you intended this parallel, but it's amusing)

Re: Canyon.mid

#195

Post by rtkwe »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #48
rtkwe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably mostly audio too given the vido is a 95% static screen. That has to encode to basically nothing.

It's 2/3 audio and 1/3 video - 1.1MB. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, most video codecs aren't tremendously efficient with static screens.

I'm not surprised. Generally the default number of frames between key/I-frames is set pretty low because too many I frames in a row tend to look bad on video content that isn't static and also if you jump to a point between 2 I frames the video can look really weird becasue it hasn't updated the I frame the P frames are manipulating.

Re: Canyon.mid

#196

Post by weiliddat »

crazygringo wrote: post #63
api wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

For Windows you could use SoundLock or Equalizer APO + plugins to have DRC.

Re: Canyon.mid

#197

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

bananaboy wrote: post #186
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just now went searching to see if there were any better quality GM drivers for Windows that let you upload a soundfonts and it looks really dire out there! The one that mainly shows up is VirtualMIDISynth ( https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth ). It seems like it supports Windows 11.

SoundFont® synths were never good. When Creative added this feature to their sound cards, they were trying to provide a cheaper alternative to dedicated hardware synths, but it did not match the quality (though it was still a step up from FM). And in the modern era, this obsolete format has somehow become more popular, now via software reimplementations, because of the catchy name or something?

I also want to point to Nuked SC-55, but that is also not based on SoundFont®.

Re: Canyon.mid

#198

Post by BizarroLand »

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.

The US debt is, for the most part, a symbol of how large our economy is instead of a representation of how deliriously in debt we are in.

It explicitly excludes the values of the assets that we hold in security of the debt, and is frequently trotted out to remind the little people how terribly large all of the problems in the world are and how hopeless it would be for any of us to try to solve them.

But!

No where in the world is the adage about, "If you owe the bank $100,000 you have a problem, but if you owe the bank $100,000,000 the bank has a problem" more evident than in the US National debt.

America could pay off this debt at any time, but doing so would cause our economy to massively deflate and cause a lot of harm and unhappiness for people all over the world, including Americans.

Not telling us these things gives America a way to inflict fear and control on its populace with no measurable downsides.

Re: Canyon.mid

#199

Post by brudgers »

miunau wrote: post #177
brudgers wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use a compressor?

Compressors destroy dynamic range. The idea is to normalize, not limit.

Compressors can manage dynamics.

When properly understood.

And provide a consistent interface for managing.

When thoughtfully placed in a signal chain.

Re: Canyon.mid

#200

Post by WorldMaker »

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…

Most DOS emulators have great support for things like Roland's sound bank ROMs. It's pretty wild to suggest that on today's Windows sometimes the best way to experience MIDI files is to maybe download a questionably illegal ROM and load up a MIDI player written for DOS in DOSBox.

It seems like a missing market for vendors to directly support better sound fonts for Windows, maybe we'd see more files written for it again. But also, there's some sense that most of the best written General MIDI files for direct consumption were always the ones for videogames and it has been left as a matter for emulation for that reason as videogames themselves moved on to different tech.

Still though, there's something about loading Monkey Island 2 with a Roland MT-32 era sound font in DREAMM and experiencing what it does with "live" MIDI instrumentation that modern games wish they could do, and sounds nearly as good doing it. For certain values of nearly, of course. Redbook audio gave us all the lovely little "mistakes" of live band things like jazz performances that MIDI could never quite replicate in the same way. I wouldn't necessarily trade modern orchestration for MIDI in all cases, but it is easy for me to imagine that it might be great to see both side-by-side and the best of both in interactive media, best tool for each job style.

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