FatBoy SoundFont • Hacker News Board

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#31

Post by prawn » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 12:25 AM UTC

cschep wrote: post #9

Any chance someone with this already setup could share a sample of DOOM E1M1?? Man, I loved that song. Thanks!

Strongly inspired by Metallica's No Remorse and/or Master of Puppets.

They also borrowed very heavily from Pantera and Slayer, amongst others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQbLSLAK2o

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#32

Post by feross » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 12:27 AM UTC

shams93 wrote: post #18

feross wrote: post #13

Nice work! I am working to improve the MIDI playback quality on my MIDI archive website, BitMidi ( https://bitmidi.com ), and I think this might help. The main difficulty with a web-based MIDI player like BitMidi is that it's not feasible to force the user to wait for a 300+ MB SoundFont to download before starting in-browser playback. The current format I use ("patch" files) has a separate file for each instrument,…

Ideally for a web midi player if you are able to generate all the general midi sounds using fm synthesis like the old 80s midi boxes you could have a really tiny download size but it would still sound really cool.

Yeah, I'd love to be able to do this, but I'm not sure my audio abilities are up to it. Do you know of any existing JS projects that do this? Or good pointers to any information about the basics of synthesis?

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#33

Post by hudbuddy » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

Without commenting on the design, I just want to say that I appreciate how well the information on the home page is laid out.

You addressed all of my questions in order and in a compelling way. Very solid melding of marketing and education.

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#34

Post by beetwenty » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 12:34 AM UTC

bullen wrote: post #12

Is it hard to make the soundfont as wave tables instead? Samples are so large!

The SF2 spec implicitly expects the sample data to be one very large sample buffer, which are subsequently resampled and looped on each new note. So it's possible to reuse the same set of single-cycle waveforms in various combinations and have a very small file(and I've seen a few floating around that are like this) - but a lot of playback routines do not implement this use-case correctly.

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#35

Post by Asooka » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 12:41 AM UTC

feross wrote: post #13

Nice work! I am working to improve the MIDI playback quality on my MIDI archive website, BitMidi ( https://bitmidi.com ), and I think this might help. The main difficulty with a web-based MIDI player like BitMidi is that it's not feasible to force the user to wait for a 300+ MB SoundFont to download before starting in-browser playback. The current format I use ("patch" files) has a separate file for each instrument,…

Can't browsers just play midi files? I know we could in the 90s and 00s.

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#36

Post by classichasclass » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 1:13 AM UTC

Asooka wrote: post #35

feross wrote: post #13

Nice work! I am working to improve the MIDI playback quality on my MIDI archive website, BitMidi ( https://bitmidi.com ), and I think this might help. The main difficulty with a web-based MIDI player like BitMidi is that it's not feasible to force the user to wait for a 300+ MB SoundFont to download before starting in-browser playback. The current format I use ("patch" files) has a separate file for each instrument,…

Can't browsers just play midi files? I know we could in the 90s and 00s.

Not directly. This was usually done through a plug-in such as QuickTime.

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#37

Post by eschutte2 » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

johnzim wrote: post #5

Love it! I had to go back and listen to one of my favorite midi tracks - the Ultima online Buccaneer's Den theme. Using this sound font there are some really major improvements. Not that the original instrumentation that shipped with machines of the day didn't have its charm. I love the fact that we used to literally ship midi files around for game music - it's such a technically elegant approach and because it could…

To continue that thought, in an interactive setting, shipping music in source form seems like it would offer some creative possibilities (thinking of things like iMUSE here).

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#38

Post by diaz » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 1:57 AM UTC

Informative. Never had any idea that these MIDI things allowed people to use different music to reproduce it. I mean I always thought that MIDI was something about connecting real instruments to computers or something, never really saw a use for it. Reading from the comments it seems people used to share and play these on a previous era. Interesting. The video of the game sounds interesting I guess.

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#39

Post by jaimex2 » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 2:02 AM UTC

Fantastic.

Duke3D and Bermuda Syndrome nostalgia time.

I used to love listening to midis back in the day, I think the soundfonts that came with my Sound blaster vibra 128 were top notch at the time.

Re: FatBoy SoundFont

#40

Post by lightedman » Mon, Jan 14, 2019, 2:04 AM UTC

feross wrote: post #13

Nice work! I am working to improve the MIDI playback quality on my MIDI archive website, BitMidi ( https://bitmidi.com ), and I think this might help. The main difficulty with a web-based MIDI player like BitMidi is that it's not feasible to force the user to wait for a 300+ MB SoundFont to download before starting in-browser playback. The current format I use ("patch" files) has a separate file for each instrument,…

The 8MB GS patch for the SBLive card is one of the most top-notch MIDI soundfonts I've heard at that size, and is freely available all over the place.