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Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

vgmusic.com

21–30 of 52 posts

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#21

I just started using Linux on my new Framework laptop, and I'm really enjoying the experience so far since it doesn't feel too different from MacOS for me. However, there doesn't seem to be a de-facto MIDI player for the desktop when I did a search for it. What should I install for Ubuntu to listen to the files? The last amazing player I've used when I was a kid was WinGroove for Windows 3.11. Had an amazing software…

VLC player should be able to do this if you install the fluidsynth addon: https://askubuntu.com/questions/128763/midi-files-not-workin...

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#22

I just started using Linux on my new Framework laptop, and I'm really enjoying the experience so far since it doesn't feel too different from MacOS for me. However, there doesn't seem to be a de-facto MIDI player for the desktop when I did a search for it. What should I install for Ubuntu to listen to the files? The last amazing player I've used when I was a kid was WinGroove for Windows 3.11. Had an amazing software…

You might want to check out FluidSynth if you don't mind a command line application. I don't think it has a graphical interface but it can run in the background, so you might be able to use it with other applications which do.

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#23
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Midi has been kinda dying - android can't play them out of the box either, nor Ubuntu.

For the uninitiated: MIDI is a fundamentally different ideology of storing sound compared to MP3, AAC, and so on. Whereas MP3 and their brethren store actual sound data, MIDI stores what is most easily described as musical scores. When you play a MIDI file, you are expected to literally provide the musical instruments to play the musical score with. In the past this was provided by your sound card with a synthesizer,…

I'd say the openness of the format deserves more recognition and is far from obsolete. Its rightful successor is tracker music, which includes the instrument samples along with the musical score. Pure waveform is a lot like closed-source software, with many inherent drawbacks.

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#25
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Midi has been kinda dying - android can't play them out of the box either, nor Ubuntu.

For the uninitiated: MIDI is a fundamentally different ideology of storing sound compared to MP3, AAC, and so on. Whereas MP3 and their brethren store actual sound data, MIDI stores what is most easily described as musical scores. When you play a MIDI file, you are expected to literally provide the musical instruments to play the musical score with. In the past this was provided by your sound card with a synthesizer,…

MIDI was designed as a way to link up a controller like a piano keyboard to a synthesizer and transmit the notes being played. In that area it's certainly not obsolete: synthesizers still transmit and receive MIDI messages and sequencer software still records them. It's the only sane way to edit and view note data because you can't edit audio easily to change a few notes.

As a way of transmitting musical scores it's obsolete, but mostly because it was really hard to get MIDI soundtracks to sound as intended because there were so many different synthesizer implementations.

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#26

I just started using Linux on my new Framework laptop, and I'm really enjoying the experience so far since it doesn't feel too different from MacOS for me. However, there doesn't seem to be a de-facto MIDI player for the desktop when I did a search for it. What should I install for Ubuntu to listen to the files? The last amazing player I've used when I was a kid was WinGroove for Windows 3.11. Had an amazing software…

If you're using gnome as desktop, you should seek for gstreamer compatible plugins:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MIDI#GStreamer-based_player...

I'm using Fedora rn, so I adjusted the packages names and did something similar to the arch wiki, so I'm not sure the closest ones for Ubuntu.

I find VLC ugly, but if you can live with it, just install the vlc plugin like a sibling post here said.

Fluidsynth is amazing and I'm using it to emulate a decent enough synth for dosbox games.

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#27

They should embed a MIDI player like this: https://cifkao.github.io/html-midi-player/

I've created a Tampermonkey script to do just that: https://gist.github.com/lachlanmcdonald/b2d9663fdb13fc1df820...

It mostly works — except I've noticed that html-midi-player will continue to play the last note if there's any kind of delay set, which is jarring. html-midi-player doesn't seem to expose a JavaScript API to make any of it simple...

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#28

It's been months since I started looking for the file for the Chirp1 ringtone in Cisco phones, to no avail. It turns out that the ringtone is procedurly generated by the phone in realtime, and no such a file exists. It sad to learn that not everything we make can be stored for high fidelity reproducibility later on.

A lot of Console music is distributed as the machine code that is fed to the synthesizer chip. Emulators have been built to faithfully reproduce that sound from the same code.

You'd have to build an emulator for the Cisco phone and extract the code that generates that sound. I'd wager it's just a routine in ARM that is creating the sound on the main CPU...

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#29
Oh my, this really sends me down memory lane. It must have been around 1996 when I spent a substantial amount of time downloading and listening to VGMusic. Back then I was on dial up and would continue to be for another five years or so. Thus, MP3s were expensive to get and it would take a good portion of an hour to download a single one anyway. With Midi I could get entire tracks in a few seconds, plug them into Winamp, and be on my merry way.

Re: Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI

#30
post #7

Sucks that I can’t seem to listen to these on mobile. Does iOS Safari not ship with a midi player?

Try this https://apps.apple.com/app/id393964792

Oh wow. An app that you just pay for once and that’s it. I’m in love.
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