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Canyon.mid

canyonmid.com

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Re: Canyon.mid

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want Midi to render consistently across devices, you are “Significantly Out of Luck.” The audio sounds like it sounds because Microsoft Licensed Roland’s GS Wavetable. Without that you lose timbral information.

That’s not the Microsoft/Roland sound.

Yeah, this sounds like an OPL2 to me

Re: Canyon.mid

#72
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.

The codec can be tuned to use a very long keyframe interval (e.g. ffmpeg’s -g option), but whether that’s worth the effort is another question.

Re: Canyon.mid

#74

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.

Well put!

You may enjoy chiptunes. Wikipedia has samples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune (see: Contemporary chiptune music)

Re: Canyon.mid

#75
Could media player actually just play midi dumps like this back in the day?

I've been on Linux for so long now, that being able to just play a MIDI file without making a bunch of decisions about soundfonts and synthesizers [1] just seems mind-blowing to me now.

Part of me wishes that just by default, mpv or something would just pick a softsynth and just play it (like WMP here) rather than have me install a separate program, pick a sound font, invoke it in some weird way to let it know what soundfont I want, and not even be able to seek back and forth.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MIDI#List_of_SoundFonts

Re: Canyon.mid

#76
post #75

Could media player actually just play midi dumps like this back in the day? I've been on Linux for so long now, that being able to just play a MIDI file without making a bunch of decisions about soundfonts and synthesizers [1] just seems mind-blowing to me now. Part of me wishes that just by default, mpv or something would just pick a softsynth and just play it (like WMP here) rather than have me install a separate p…

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

Re: Canyon.mid

#77

Please 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?

I don't think this is true in practice anymore. Given that most sources are 16 bit wide, and afaik most OSes internally use 24 bits these days in the OS mixer (at least my laptop does), the information loss is negligible (just some rounding errors and that's it).

I'd be much more worried about 44.1khz sources being resampled to 48khz if that's the OS playback rate. I mean you won't be able to hear that either in practice but at least it's not negligible.

Re: Canyon.mid

#78
post #76
post #75

Could media player actually just play midi dumps like this back in the day? I've been on Linux for so long now, that being able to just play a MIDI file without making a bunch of decisions about soundfonts and synthesizers [1] just seems mind-blowing to me now. Part of me wishes that just by default, mpv or something would just pick a softsynth and just play it (like WMP here) rather than have me install a separate p…

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

Re: Canyon.mid

#79
post #59
post #25

Why did we kill all that beautiful minimalism? Computers had enough gaming, entertainment and productivity back then. But the definition of "enough" kept changing. Like a carrot tied to stick attached to an animal.

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.

Objectively music was less massproduced, equal low quality slop in earlier years.

Re: Canyon.mid

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the Microsoft/Roland sound.

Canyon.mid on my windows computer is.

It sounds noticeably different in Windows Media Player. The video is probably using a Yamaha OPL chip, as found in Sound Blaster cards.
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