Yes, I know it's just a "retro looking computer" to frame a YouTube video but...
I had to look up the Tandy 1000 RSX, because it seemed very wrong to have 16-color VGA graphics coming out of a computer labeled as "Tandy 1000".
Tandy 1000 RSX was the last model from 1991, and it had Super VGA rather than the famous "Tandy graphics" that originated with the IBM PCJr. It did not come with an Adlib or Sound Blaster card, which is what was depicted in the YouTube video. But the computer did have one ISA slot, and an Adlib or Sound Blaster compatible card could have been installed.
It also had a 386 processor rather than the 286 normally found on Tandy 1000 computers, and 1MB of RAM.
VGA on a Tandy 1000 wasn't all that unusual. Most if not all of the earlier Tandy 1000 models that had ISA slots could take a VGA card in them. The hardware worked fine (it's just memory bus accesses under 1mb and I/O port instructions), it just depended on software support to do anything with it. Tandy's magazine PCM often listed and rated add-in VGA cards. I remember reading of a later version of DeskMate that supported VGA resolution.
The late Lonnie Falk would have been happy to see that PCM did such a good job of covering Radio Shack's computers that it is thought of as Tandy's magazine. Falsoft's line of magazines covering that area probably added at least a few million to Tandy's bottom line.
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.
For me it was Epic Pinball on a Sound Blaster 16. Playing Duke Nukem 1 was awesome and all(wish I could go back) but when I heard the intro to Epic Pinball come out of these speakers:
https://assets.superhivemarket.com/store/product/190602/imag...
It was one of those moments where computers blew my 8 year old mind, I was never the same.
I can still perfectly hear the twang of the Monkey Island theme song on PC speaker, and vastly prefer it to generic MIDI renditions.
My, where did the years go...
Glorious!!! Even the channel name is too perfect :)
At first I couldn't understand this sentiment; pc speaker always sounded so abrasive to me. Then I followed the link below and a wave of nostalgia washed over me.
I went through a phase in high school of MIDI arrangements of songs I liked. Including crazy guitar solo music.
Good times.
If you did have one, it might be in the list of sound fonts on this incredible(!) player: https://chiptune.app/?q=canyon.mid
The midi versions are also pretty boring compared to the Amiga versions of the LucasArts soundtracks to be honest.
Well put!
You may enjoy chiptunes. Wikipedia has samples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune (see: Contemporary chiptune music)
What exactly was the difference between PC speakers and MIDI? Why do we no longer need a MIDI device today to play the “correct” sound?
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 sample, we can emulate (or play a recording of) anything.
[1] Personally I remember this midi file sounding different/better. Maybe because I'm remembering using a Sound Blaster AWE64 while playing these things in Windows?
There's a "correct" sound in that the MIDI standard itself doesn't specify a standard instrument assignment. For that, there's General MIDI but also entirely different approaches (like the MT-32 instrument assignment, which predates General MIDI) and extensions to General MIDI (like Roland's GS and Yamaha's XG). Some didn't have a standard assignment at all (like the FB-01). Even the Adlib and earlier Soundblaster cards didn't have exactly GM compatible MIDI playback drivers; General MIDI specifies a minimum number of 24 simultaneous voices, and an OPL2 or even a pair of them can't satisfy that requirement.
There's also a "correct" sound insofar that the tracks were usually arranged using one sound module or another. Even when devices are compatible in the sense that they have adopted the same standard, hearing music on another device than the one the soundtrack was originally arranged for will cause some degradation, because the standards are only loosely specified in terms of timbre, volume levels, envelopes etc.
Some DOS games have specific arrangements for a variety of different kinds of MIDI devices for these reasons, with different mix levels and instrument setup, sometimes scaled down arrangements, adjustments for the instrument patches and even loading entirely new patches onto the devices.
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.
Pinball Fantasies was actually quite impressive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb8mLBa3dcg
Huh, impressive indeed!
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
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.
It was composed for at least two, the Windows 3.1 version uses Microsoft's weird MIDI format from that time that contains a simplified version of the arrangement alongside the full version, and which you would hear depends on the configured MIDI Mapper settings.
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
I can play the guitar parts on a banjo but it ain't going to sound right.
In 1900, QRS began making piano rolls. By 1920, they had invented a machine to capture piano players directly and over the years QRS captured many including Liberace, George Gershwin, and even Roger Miller playing Autumn Leaves.
QRS is still in business and some of its product lines use Midi conversions of piano rolls and last month I landed a mixed lot with a bunch of those Midi files on 3.5” floppy disks.
I had George Gershwin rocking a Yamaha XG clavichord and Liberace on a Sitar and similar shenanigans.
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 with little memory in the late 1990's, and were trying not to compete with the high-end hardware of the time (because both license samples from Roland, who made such hardware).
General MIDI as a format basically died for serious computer use in the early 2000's. It's still a feature of some home keyboards and things, but it is a case where they genuinely do not “make them like they used to”. If you want the greatest possible GM support, you have to buy old hardware from e.g. the Roland Sound Canvas or Yamaha MU series, or obtain old software (no longer sold) like Roland Sound Canvas VA or Yamaha S-YXG50.
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.
Thanks for the inspiration to dig this up for comparison:
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.
"The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice."
I am reminded of Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, which let the PC speaker output something beyond just bleeps and bloops.
So Sony figured out something called a “1-bit DAC”. It’s something like dither, and so was the method of generating voice audio in Mean Streets.
MIDI files like this depend of the General MIDI standardized specification for electronic musical instruments.
When they say "PC Speaker" they mean that thing that beeps when your computer fails to boot being used to play music, not normal speakers vs dedicated midi device.
MIDI in consumer use mostly went away once digitized sound became cheap enough. Though it's still very much there if you're composing or engraving music, for example with a program like MuseScore.
Speakers (and rooms) have their own unique acoustical properties (e.g. distortion, frequency response, etc.). Also it matters where your ears are.
Finally, “high fidelity” is not a synonym for “musical.”
As others have already said, MIDI is a spec and does not contain any actual sounds. General Midi's big thing was probably its defined list of sounds but that was really only a naming convention.
The great thing about MIDI is that it is easily routable to any number of things (physical instruments, samplers, etc.).
Being able to listen to Sonic 2 - Chemical Zone with a combination of a Minimoog Model D and a Jun-6 (basically a Juno-6) is unbelievably fun.
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.
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.
> 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..
Are you talking about the 90s or now? Because those were all at least as true then as now. Everything took forever. You needed more RAM every month. Everything crashed constantly. I had to reinstall Win98SE so many fucking times that I can still type F73WT-WHD3J-CD4VR-2GWKD-T38YD from memory.
The amount of suck in commercial software is constant. Companies always prioritize adding the shiny-looking features that sell software to rubes over improving things like memory use, response time, and general quality of life until the quality of life is actually bad enough to drive customers to another vendor, so it's perpetually bad enough to keep the average customer right on the edge of "oh fuck this, I'm switching to something else."
Software crashed all the time back then. Hitting control-S was one of those things you just did by habit so as to not lose too much work when it happened.
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 to, not because I have to. I run half a dozen browsers and hundreds of tabs and play YouTube while waiting for a remote machine to deploy to an immutable temp instance that gets destroyed after every test cycle.
I speak to my AIs and I can live and work anywhere on this planet that legally allows me.
There are problems in our world and on our machines and in our governments but apps don’t take 10 seconds to load.
Except ServiceNow. I’ll give you that one.
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...
Gimp. On any system.
Notice how everybody replying says "less than 5s".
As if anything done on a machine going through 10_000_000_000 (10 Giga) instructions per seconds should be anything but perceived instantaneous, for it's finite lifetime human user.
On my personal 2017-vintage i5-7200U, GIMP opens in under 5 seconds. On the computer I had for my last job, a 2023-ish i7, about 30 seconds. The problem was the shitheap of corporate security software that bogged down the zillion file access operations during application startup, not the app itself.
GIMP takes ~2s to start on my 2016 Linux laptop.
(Though I do think it takes significantly longer to start on my 2024 MBP…)
GIMP takes pretty long to launch indeed, but it's still under 5 seconds on my 6yo XPS 13. Even on my Cortex-A53 phone it doesn't reach 10 seconds.
>To be fair, the quality of software has dramatically dropped
Part of my job when I was a youngn, was rebooting the Windows NT server running the software router because packets stopped forwarding for the entire net cafe.
I don’t know what period your referencing but software quality wasn’t exactly amazing back in the day. It did mandate a higher degree of validation before release due to the distribution nature (physical media as opposed to a download) but even then some remarkably dumb bugs made it out the door
Software quality has massively improved across every dimension. Memory constraints are basically non-existent for most people. Software is more reliable, discoverable and portable than at any time in history. The idea that reinstalling your OS is more common today than 30 years ago is just obviously not true. We are currently living through a golden age of software.
Your note taking app doesn't need AI, but it also doesn't need OLE, which represented an equally hot buzzword ("software componentry") of the 90s that Microsoft was trying to shoehorn into everything.
Every generation has its hype cycle; it's nothing new.
I had found often not only adding too much bloat and stuff but also often lacks stuff which is actually useful. (I wrote programs the way that I do, in order to try to avoid the problems; it is not perfect but in some ways it helps.)
> 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.
Is it? I think there's a common tendency to "stop exploring" cultural artifacts very deeply as we age, but not everyone shares this trait. Some people continue to value novelty in those areas well into old age.
For my part, treasured artifacts of my youth don't impede my ability to appreciate new things. And indeed, I think many videogames I loved dearly have aged poorly.
I don't think nostalgia is the only factor here. If it were, then no young people would be interested in old computers, which I have found not to be the case.
I don't know. I'm glad I no longer have a tower which makes so much noise with its fads and that big ugly screens from my younger years. I far more prefer my current settings. Well, I didn't have so much noise with my very first computer, an Amstrad 6128, but I don't really miss "run paper" that much either.
And to me the best desktop experience in term of software has been gnome 3 after it had time to hone its jump forward from its previous major release. So, not the newest hot thing out there, but not my first crush.
Regarding forward, augmented reality on glasses seems to have great potentials, but I don't have much hope foe the default systems they will come with. A future where most people wear those stuff filled with signal tailored by the ad industry and whatever governments is just not letting much room escaping the obvious various dystopian scenarios.
Objectively music was less massproduced, equal low quality slop in earlier years.
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.
I seriously doubt nostalgia for old computers correlates to perceptions of U.S. debt.
Having said that, I wasn’t the only person deeply upset when Greenspan gave the green light for Bush’s tax cuts. Under Clinton we were on track to wipe out the debt in another 10 years.
I'm not talking about old computers themselves, but rather something that's mistakenly taken as nostalgia.
Things in the 90s were more straightforward because supply chains and business processes were much shorter and less complex. What people interpret as nostalgia might actually reflect a recognition that systems/products genuinely were more efficient before they became increasingly layered with intermediaries and dependencies.
An illustration of these dependencies and layers is debt - the mounting complexity parallels the mounting debt levels.
> Computers had enough gaming
Had they? I gamed in the 90s and I game now. And boy, its not even remotely the same and iam thrilled to see what comes next (hello, gta6)
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...
That's my point -- the onward march of technology means that not only can I continue playing U7, the work of passionate fans has made it so that I can play an improved version (higher perceptual frame rate, higher resolution, better and more consistent sound, etc) that takes advantage of the improved hardware on a device I bring with me everywhere.
Personally I'd put Planescape: Torment in consideration but yes Ultima VII is great.
Simply because games these days are exactly designed to extract dopamine from people, and in the 90s they were mostly driven by pain.
Objectively speaking, computers back in the 90's were not capable of organizing the information that a single human being would be interested in, let alone the information of a community or state or country or the world.
I am happy with the potential that we have available today to do things that we couldn't in the past. And it's always possible to improve software on top of more capable hardware and OSes.
Asceticism doesn't generate revenue. That's why striving capital needs a population that consumes more, and fat in technologies is not an exception.
Software in the '90s was mostly driven by altruism, software in '20s starts with an A-round.
What's an A round?
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
I think business competition has killed the minimality. Because minimality doesn't sell as a quality. Competitor would throw more power and more features into the market. It is not driven by the need for such power or features. Consumer is forced to move to a bloated product as minimal products are removed or made extinct due to incompatible ecosystem.
Because high-speed internet became omnipresent. The act of making a software release stopped having a cost associated with it, like having to print CDs and ship them to stores. Software transitioned from meaningful releases, each of which needed to be as bug-free as possible and had to be sold to users as a genuine meaningful upgrade, to this pathetic eternal beta we now have.
Also because everyone seems too scared to practice adversarial interoperability.
Also because SoCs are now a thing which allows unhackable secure boot and other DRM-like functionality that prevents people from modifying their own devices to act in their own interest, or, as is the case with Android devices, allows it but punishes the user for having gained full access to their own device.
It's funny how you want minimalism yet another commenter commented about an experimental OS needing to have a modern UI to be relevant. Just can't win.
Modern technology has made it a lot easier to build video games or entertainment (music, movies, etc) affordably and in a reasonable amount of time. The diversity of entertainment out there for you to experience cheaply is incredible compared to the 90s or 00s, even if we lost some stuff like Flash along the way.
Nearly 19000 games were released on Steam in 2024. A lot of the most interesting stuff that came out simply wouldn't have existed 10 or 20 years ago. I think it's great that those things can exist now and potentially find an audience.
On Linux you can customize your UI to achieve any look you want.
- A Windows 3.1 window manager theme
- The Windows 3.1 fonts with font hinting/antialiasing disabled
- Windows 3.1 icons
- A matching cursor theme
- Lower your display resolution
This is a silly question.
It will never be enough until we can manipulate the fabric of space and time directly as gods and create entirely new universes and physics and live forever for an infinity infinities.
The ratio of our infinitesimal, geologically small existence to the whole of the light cone and the observable universe - it is just a glimpse at the fractal of what will be enough to satiate our curiosity and desire.
This.
The same drive for betterment that made our species “kill such beautiful minimalism” was the one that lifted billions out of subsistence farming and 50% infant death rate, and will be the one to escape the destruction of planet earth by sun’s evolution. You cannot have one without the other.
There is societal improvement and then there is the huge amount of ego driven waste and externalized harm. Ideally, theoretically, we could have a lot of the former without a lot of the latter. In practice this ratio seems to be getting worse. Me-first attitudes are way up, profit is misunderstood as merit.
I don't think OP is asking whether we should give up looking for advances in astrophysics. OP is asking "why did we add all of these freaking popups and theme tweaks? They're distracting me from using my computer to make advances in astrophysics!"
I'd say try Linux.
Moving in that direction, even recursive infinities won't bring someone anywhere near satisfaction, contentment and delight.
Curiosity and desire can be focused on minimalism and elegance of the smallest most essential cores of whatever is at stake.
Youtube.
The creator of Canyon.mid, George Stone, was interviewed here: https://pixelatedaudio.com/canyon-mid/
Thanks for that info. I was wondering if it was some undercover Dave Grusin contract work.
his story reminds me of Elwood Edwards:
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.
yep, that made the front page here when it happened. Not black bar but it was I think in the top 5.
I'm slightly impressed that the video (3.4 MB) is only 100 times larger than the original MIDI (33 kB)
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.
I remember being _very_ frustrated as a child that the music in "Hover!" sounded significantly different when we upgraded from our 486 to a Pentium II machine. The Sound Blaster gave the music a very distinct quality that was lacking in the software MIDI synthesizer.
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.
The video is using audio because of variable Midi rendering.
And any OPL is almost certainly emulated, not an actual chip.
Yeah, this sounds like an OPL2 to me
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.
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.
a good quality soundfont is easily more than 3.4MB! But maybe back then nobody was using a soundfont that big
If you like that kind of thing: manufacturers used to create demo songs for synth keyboards and modules:
* Emu Proteus 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5FffG_0sqw
* Emu Proteus 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4KW9uWCY3A
* Roland MT-32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdSKg5G9MPc&t=22s
* Roland D-10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXGdyp7Ml-Y
* Roland SC-33: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as_jVNIvleI (complete with MIDI animation)
* Yamaha MU100: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BL_RzeWDxg (1 hour!)
Etc. Don't know if they still do, but it was a thing when these "romplers" came on the market.
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?
Because the quality drop is imperceptible for most people, but the convenience of having volume controls at the component that makes sound isn't.
The loss of information from a reduction of bit depth is purely a reduction of signal-to-noise ratio; the least significant bit is dithered to eliminate quantization distortion. In normal domestic listening scenarios this is usually imperceptible, because the noise floor imposed by dither is below the threshold of hearing for any reasonable gain staging.
https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-dithering-in-audio....
Because in order to get the best dynamic range while listening to diverse music, you need to detect the loudness of tracks and albums and adjust the gain of each track/album accordingly. In order to have room for the music player to adjust the volume higher for quieter tracks, you need to apply a "pregain" to lower the volume overall, while turning up your speakers to compensate. This solves the problem, but by doing this, your music player will generally have a lower volume relative to all other applications on the system, meaning that it generally will be desirable to turn down application-specific volume knobs accordingly.
More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuEtQqC-Sqo
I'm a bit star-struck to have you reply to my somewhat offhand comment, am aware of your audio player work and really want to be a Zig convert (just missing those vec3 and complex operators, having equal mathematical standing to ints and floats) and your original Zig intro video is IMO one of the best tech presentations of all time, but I digress...
I'm aware of ReplayGain and this processing is important for per-track overall gain, but what I'm getting at is lower level: instead of there being two lossy/rounded stages of dimming and amplification, you want to communicate to the OS a log2 "dimming factor", so that this can be subtracted from a later log2 amplification factor such that we ideally waste no processing time if the sum is zero, and otherwise don't suffer the twice-quantised signal degradation (at most one accurate scaling pass, instead of two arbitrarily precision-reducing ones). It's maybe a minor point / imperceptible as others have noted, but IMO this seems like the Correct (TM) approach.
Why not use a compressor?
Compressors destroy dynamic range. The idea is to normalize, not limit.
Ah so that's why my headphone amp disables volume control on the output entirely.
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.
You're correct, with Realtek AC97 devices the resampling used to sound absolutely horrendous. Like they picked the worst possible algo. It's not as big of an issue these days though.
I just like to have my audio samples divisible by a (preferably large) power of two — what's wrong with that? Sounds more crispy that way.
Apps shouldn’t even have local volume controls. It’s an OS function.
I do not want to have to go hunt down the app in a list of all currently running apps in some os-level mixer to turn down or up one app. It is absolutely both an os and an app function. Both are needed.
It's a problem because the OS doesn't mandate control. If every app had to function via OS volume controls and APIs, the world would be a wonderful place.
Truly first-class audio with sublime control plane ergonomics.
That'll never happen since any random app developer can just multiply audio volume by a float in whatever API and attach their own unique take on a slider. I'll merit the cases where you need to have individual level and channel controls, such as editing software and professional music tools, but most apps are not these.
It's times like this when I do appreciate Apple's dictatorial take on things, though even they could not win this fight.
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 have them competing with each other.
But without this, an app does have to have local volume controls.
Also, it's important to be able to set gain as well, i.e. turn the volume "above 100%". For those YouTube videos that for some reason are only 5% as loud as other videos. Even better is if you can set the gain per-video so that it won't be absurdly loud and clipping when you move on to the next video.
Bonus points if an OS or media player ever gives the option of a dynamic compressor, so you can actually listen to those amateur podcasts where one speaker's microphone is 10x quieter than another's. Or listen to the quiet parts of classical music recordings even in the presence of background noise.
> Mac definitely doesn't
https://github.com/kyleneideck/BackgroundMusic and others.
Well sometimes you want Spotify running at a lower volume than your 100 people Teams meeting, or maybe the other way around ;)
Yeah, because clicking out of the app to adjust its volume is fun!
Clicks for the click God!
Not affiliated at all but just came across and I wish this was built in to windows: https://github.com/File-New-Project/EarTrumpet
It pauses when I click on it. Firefox on linux.
There are no controls to indicate that you can pause and restart, but this just-click-anywhere-to-play/pause has been standard on all video players everywhere for a long time.
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
Windows and macOS have both bundled similar low-quality licensed versions of a Roland GS sample set and low-quality software synthesisers since the late 1990's. Neither of them are as good as even the lowest-end dedicated hardware General MIDI synth from Roland was, but they're still better than nothing. You're unlucky because you happen to be using Linux. unfortunately the best in that field was and remains proprietary so this will probably never be solved on that platform.
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.
Yes, there was even a <bgsound> HTML tag to play MIDI files, which was heavily used in places like Geocities.
I really like the windows 3.1/3.11 GUI. Simple, clear and snappy. I feel like anything else that has come after it is just inferior and bloated.
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!"
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)
there's something steady about this setup. no rush to replace, just quiet continuity. a system that kept adapting without losing itself. not optimized, just enough. canyon.mid plays like it always did. the zip drive fits because it earned its place. nothing here is pretending. it's all real use, stretched across years. machines like this taught patience. they gave back what you put in.
This reminds me of the demo tape that came with old Sony cassette players. It had Entertainer on side A, and another instrumental called Andalusia (or somehting similar) on side B, which I have never been able to track down.
My parent's Thorn music centre came with a cassette with Herb Alpert's Taste of Honey (although probably not the original).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRGOm071sE0
And I still love that tune.
Note: It sounded differently on different sound cards because their wavetable/sound fonts/MIDI chips were different, so there was no canonical, universal rendering of MID files.
For those who remember... :) man I miss when things are simpler, slower, maybe more manual, more tedious, but more configurable, more buggy, but more creative. I understand we got here through multiple step changes of improvements, but I'm just nostalgic - good memories!
The Zip drive in the picture feels slightly anachronistic though. Technically it isn’t, having been release a few months before Windows 95, but still.
Zip Drives began as Parallel Port devices, and PCs had parallel ports since the beginning. It's not like it's a USB device or something like that.
I don’t think that’s a good counterargument. For example, an Olympus P-330 dye-sublimation photo printer from 1998 also uses a parallel port, but would nevertheless seem out of place for the Windows 3.11 era.
I mean... to be super honest, I was there, and 1998 was ALSO Windows 3.1 era. The future is not evenly distributed and a TON of people in 1998 still had Windows 3.1 as their daily driver. Windows 95 was a big big thing but a lot of people waited out of choice or necessity. 4MB of RAM was hard to come by for a lot of computers.
CANYON.MID was shipped with Windows 3.1 IIRC.
Yes, hence it predates the availability of Zip drives, which are more of a Windows 95-era thing.
Doesn't feel anachronistic for me, as people kept items from different eras on their desks in the 90s.
The video shows Windows 3.11 though.
My point is that while there is a small time window where Zip drives were available and Windows 3.11 was still the latest consumer Windows (ignoring NT here), Zip drives feel more like Windows 95-era. A stack of 3.5” floppy disks would have felt more authentic.
It's a very "borderline between eras" picture. The 1000 RSX was a late Tandy model. It has a 386 CPU and VGA graphics, which makes it a pretty reasonable Win 3.11 machine. It's a system that could technically run Win 95 but it'd struggle with that CPU and limited RAM capacity. You really wanted a 486 or Pentium for Win 95.
The monitor is the standard Tandy VGA monitor of the system's era. The styling on the speakers feel newer than the RSX's 1991 launch, they're more what I'd expect from the mid to late 90s.
You had to upgrade the VGA chip's BIOS to use Win 95 on it:
> The ACUMOS VGA graphics can be software-updated with Cirrus Logic BIOS (via MS-DOS driver) to allow VESA/SVGA to function in Windows 95, as the Windows 3.xx Tandy VGA drivers are insufficient for Windows 95.
ref: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Tandy_1000_R-Series
I think the background image is probably authentic, it has the feel of a mid-late 90s digital camera picture. It reads to me as the desk of someone who is trying to keep that system alive long past its prime years. Which were arguably over before they started, given 486 systems had been available for a bit when this launched. We end up with an early 90s system with a handful of mid-late 90s peripherals.
The bigger problem to me is this sounds like MIDI played back on a sound card with FM synthesis. The 1000 RSX had the poorly supported Tandy 3 tones + DAC sound hardware. You could install an AdLib, Sound Blaster, or other card to give it MIDI FM synth capability, but the base system can't do it. Alas, we can't see the back to see if it has such an upgrade...
I think the picture was taken using a film camera. The resolution is way too high for 90’s digital cameras.
As a data point/anecdote, I had a parallel-port Zip drive with a 386 and Windows 3.1. I remember quite clearly that I had to load a SCSI driver in CONFIG.SYS. I didn't understand back then why I had to load a SCSI driver for a parallel port device, years later I found out that the parallel port version was actually the SCSI version but it tunnelled the SCSI protocol via the parallel interface...
> was still the latest consumer Windows
When I was a kid, I was using Windows 95 for a while when Me was already a thing - newer versions could technically run, but the experience wasn't great on that hardware. You could even still find Windows 3.11 computers at my school at the time. Computers don't go die at the exact moment a successor becomes available on the market.
The Tandy 1000 RSX had a 386SX. The 386SX was a lower cost, 16-bit data bus version. Windows 95 minimum requirements were a 386DX (32-bit data bus) or better with a 486 recommended. Here's an excerpt from the comp.sys.tandy FAQ. If nothing else, read the second paragraph.
* III.C.1. Can I run Windows on my 1000?
...
The RLX's can run Windows 3.1 in standard mode only, if they have the RAM upgraded to 1M. The RLX just barely meets the minimum hardware require- ments for Windows 3.1, however, and performance will be poor. Windows will not recognize the built-in mouse (see section II.G.2.). One user says of Windows 3.1 on the 1000RLX:
Windows' performance is tolerable on a 486DX2/66. I like it on the RLX because I can start a program, go to the bathroom, and when I come back only have to wait a few minutes before I can actually use the #@$% thing.
The RSX's can run Windows 3.1 (or 3.11) in 386 enhanced mode if the memory has been upgraded to 2M or more. There is a Windows sound driver for the RSX's built-in sound at my ftp/WWW site and at Tandy's support WWW site (see sections IV.B.1. and IV.B.2.).
Tandy does not officially support the use of Windows on any model of the 1000-series. The RSX's could theoretically run Windows 95, but Microsoft does not recommend Win95 for 386's.
I had a Zip drive before I had a Windows 95 PC.
The Zip Drive on the table to the right, tho ...
Remember the times when websites were able to play MIDI files?
I played the hell out of this midi file when I got my soundblaster 16 in the early/mid 90s!
My personal favourite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9BtuPpW9w.
I can hear that Model M just be looking at it. The break on the buckling springs is still one of the best you can get.
That's a Tandy lookalike of the Model M, it's a rubber dome keyboard.
Anyone have the other SoundBlaster era demo .MIDs at hand? I think there was...Self Control? rhythm.mid? A couple others that I can't remember?
These are 1992-era MIDI files that came bundled with MIDISoft Recording Session. Note that they contain both "Base" and "Extended" tracks in the same file, so there will be piano notes on channel 16 that are supposed to be percussion. A MIDI player such as Falcosoft Soundfont MIDI Player will detect those kinds of songs and automatically mute channel 16. (There is actually a way to mark channel 16 as a percussion channel, but the people who made those midis in 1992 didn't know about it)
I remember this media player from back in the day :)
Looking at it now, I love how they used a scroll bar as the UI widget to represent playback progress.
"You bolt awake on the NY subway. You are not online. It is 1987 AD. You are Judge Reinhold, and are an office worker in a comedy movie. The future cannot come to pass. Rome must burn."
This brought back a lot of memories!
Canyon.mid played using modern virtual instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfVobqrIymc
Canyon.mid played using modern real instruments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QN3ToFCv_s
Is that an iomega drive in the background!?
Yes, indeed. Likely a parallel-port version unless that machine has a SCSI card.
Heard it in my head as soon as I saw the title on HN
the better one, clouds.mid - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TLtg4KfyL4
That iframe really needs some CSS filters.
For some reason I don't understand, CSS filters sometimes make webpages completely unresponsive and unusable on my Librem 5.
If you're using Firefox, that'll be because it's limited to software rendering until etnaviv catches up with GLES3 support.
Disappointed this isn't an actual VM running Windows 3.1 in the browser.
"Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot." Super cool, YouTube.
Hopefully no one does this. Enabling them gets us further into this mess.
Problem is, I'm already signed in. I'm never NOT signed in. But for some reason playing video anywhere not started on YouTube.com now hits me with that garbage.
Now do Brian Orr's clouds.mid for Windows 95.
https://www.brianorr.com/blog/2010/01/14/windows-95-easter-e...
Personally I prefer onestop.mid :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlUzgM6TiI4 I had forgotten this one. It's awesome.
What a wild ride we have taken with computing over the last 40 years. I’m 43 and my first computer looked even older than this - one color display, dual floppy disks and no hard drive. Now we have AI deploy to gigaclouds and monitor it with pocket computers.
Get a load the big shot over here with two floppy drives! No mid-game disks changes for you!
Ahh ... retro. The many ways by which the past beckons us.
All right. Apropos the retro theme, here's a Web page dedicated to my Apple II program "Electric Duet": https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/
The gory details: the Apple II had a simple TTL output connected to a speaker -- crude, not meant for music, and certainly not with two voices. Did this stop me? Read on.
I created an assembly-language player that switched the TTL speaker driver's output at 8 kilohertz, then created two musical voices by controlling the pulse width of the 8 KHz clock. So two voices, two notes at once, from a TTL driver.
Here's a sample of the music Electric Duet created, on an Apple II, in 1981: https://arachnoid.com/electric_duet/music_tracks/prelude.mp3 -- press the play button.
That's retro defined.
Some previous discussion in 2021:
I didn't like canyon.mid back in the day. I'd much rather play popcorn or axelfoley!
I agree - to me, canyon.mid (while technically neat) has a very Corporate 1990's Advertisement sound and feel. Not surprising since, in a way, that's exactly what it is!
So that particular track never gelled with me.
I listened the heck out of some of the other included sound and MIDI sample material however, back then. As one did, with sources being so comparatively limited in the pre- and early- Web years.
