Why has been the culture of MIDI music creation and sharing so dead for more than a decade Holla Forums?
Was it the normiezation of the internet which entirely killed the music culture of the Geocities days? I understand there used to be significantly more enthusiasm for digital synth during the 90s, with synthesizer soundcards like Adlib, MT32 and Creative, and also the 80s had given us some timeless instruments like the Yamaha DX7 and Roland D50.
Nowadays the Vgmusic archive site is still a thing, but you see the decline in music count with passing console generations. It's pretty difficult to find anything under newer gen systems and it's pretty saddening.
Let's make this a thread to discuss oldschool synth tech, and also sites you know or creations you might have done.
Personally I find that the some of the "japanese geocities" still have a number of good sites, though those are in decline as well.
The synthesizer on the Adlib is Yamaha's OPL2. I like this version as well and in fact I still listen to a lot of OPL3, software emulated or from an old Toshiba laptop from ebay. I love FM synthesis.
Linux has Bisqwit's ADLMIDI (based on Dosbox OPL), and there's an OPL3 GM soundbank somewhere based on some internet guy's patch library, which is extremely good as well.
Mason Young
Looks like AdLib got jewed pretty hard by Creative.
Wiki: The success of the AdLib Music Card soon attracted competitors. Not long after its introduction, Creative Labs introduced the competing Sound Blaster card. The Sound Blaster was fully compatible with AdLib's hardware, meaning it would play any past, present, and future game written for AdLib's own card. But it also added two key features absent from the Adlib: a PCM audio channel, and a game port. PCM audio could record and play digital-audio recordings, which included dialogue, sound effects, and short musical performances. Although the PCM audio-fidelity was scarcely better than AM radio, it allowed game developers to include realistic sound-effects and speech that could not be reproduced by the Yamaha's FM synthesis, and proved very popular among game developers. Finally, the Sound Blaster's inclusion of a game-port made it a single-card gaming system. With a superior product and better marketing, the Sound Blaster quickly overshadowed AdLib as the de facto standard in PC-gaming audio. AdLib's slow response, the AdLib Gold, did not sell well enough to sustain the company.
In 1992, Ad Lib filed for bankruptcy while the Sound Blaster family continued to dominate the PC gaming industry. That same year, Binnenalster GmbH purchased the assets of Ad Lib from the Government of Quebec, who had acquired them to prevent Creative Labs from buying them. The company was renamed AdLib Multimedia and relaunched the AdLib Gold soundcard and many other products. Binnenalster sold AdLib Multimedia to Softworld Taiwan in 1994.
Samuel Clark
I'm definitely going to have to go through the math section here, looks like it'd be cool to learn about. I know very little about MIDI and synthesizers.
Let's have some Monkey island reggae because why not.
Allow me to recommend Puredata, it's a great tool for prototyping audio systems, DSP effects whatever. You'll find tons of tutorials and it will help you to implement the concepts. You'll still benefit programming in lowlevel C++, but Puredata definitely helps getting to real results quickly.
Blake Gomez
I'll look into it.
I should have made this a webm
Ian Kelly
To the computer engineers here, how difficult would it be to build a DIY sound car for playing simple MIDI's? Some of the boards here look like they have very simple designs, so that could be a fun project.
Levi Smith
Well to start the best idea would certainly to develop over the USB bus, since it has standardized definitions for audio and MIDI class protocols, and therefore universal compatibility.
Elaborate what you want to do. MIDI and audio are separate things. Do you mean something along the lines of Roland Sound Canvas? If so, timidity++ is an excellent software replacement, despite outdated, with much more rendering options.
Also, Linux on SBC computers with USB OTG capabilities, has gadget drivers to make the device expose talk audio class protocol. I've already a built MIDI device based on a Raspberry Zero, never tried anything using audio class though.
Henry Hernandez
Yeah I'm leaving this dumb website for good.
Julian Torres
Good, because you clearly don't understand board culture.
Jacob Garcia
Browsing Holla Forums during vacation is a mistake
Cooper Morgan
I agree, don't come back here. If I'd known you were going on vacation, I'd have recommended a camp for you.
Asher Reyes
I'll take the software approach for now, but I'm actually more interested in the techniques for controlling and generating sounds than actually playing anything I could compose.
Luis Ortiz
Fuck you right to hell you hook nosed dirty heeb. I wish the holocaust were real, so it could happen again.
Jose Rogers
Look up CCRMA workshop lessons by Romain Michon, there's a series of 16 of them. They are centered on Faust language, but nevertheless they're surely the best audio introductory material I have encountered.
Isaac Cooper
Thanks I made a note of them.
Mason Bailey
In my language (it is in the dictionary, apparently jews write hundreds of letters fruitlessly each year to make the publisher scrap the word) "acting like a jew" or "jew antics" is a correct term to describe unfair competing tactics.
Not going to this website will not make jews any less evil.
Joshua Powell
This should be a fitting thread theme from now on.
Adam Bennett
Damn, now I just want to remove shekels from good goys.
Cooper Lopez
The internet is an amazing place, look what I found.
Gabriel Gutierrez
Except that's exactly what didn't happen. Creative released a product with superior features (PCM sound is pretty fucking huge) and Adlib sat on its laurels. The winner was the customer.
So you're clearly just retarded unless you're just trying to make anti-Semites look retarded, in which case, well done.
Jackson Scott
They were (((Creative))) alright. No but seriously, the Jewed part doesn't mean they created an inferior product, in this case it's the opposite. By designing their hardware to be completely backwards compatible, and then adding the additional features they completely obliterated their competition, ultimately forcing adlib into bankruptcy.
You took offence because you have a long-nose and your name echoes, but you should be self-aware enough not to take internet trolling and jabs both seriously and personally.
Jonathan Ortiz
They used the standard set by Adlib and improved upon it. Do you really think it would have been better for consumers or for programmers if sound cards were like video cards where every vendor had his version of "Super VGA." By that logic, AMD microprocessors should use a completely different instruction set architecture from Intel because Intel created x86.
Stop turning everything into Holla Forums.
Tyler Lee
I'm impressed.
Lincoln Price
Tracker modules are where it's at, sounded better back in the day, still a vibrant scene now: scenemusic.net modarchive.org
This. Creative's rise wasn't any weaselier than its competitors (and in fact AdLib was based on industry standard parts).
There's lots of horrible things Creative did AFTER they achieved market dominance, like sabotaging Aureal in court, dropping a patent claim on the idTech open source release, and arguably producing such a strong monopoly as to incentivize motherboard manufacturers and game developers into colluding on the destruction of the entire consumer PC audio hardware market out of spite, setting the state of the art since the late 2000s back at least a decade.
Dominic Ramirez
Chip tunes FamiTracker
My work here is done.
Eli King
I just came to say that general midi sucks.
I try to use mpd to play midi with opl3 emulation using modplug, but it uses general midi by default. I'm not sure how to specify which plugin to use.
Brody Martin
All the communists in this thread crying about capitalism.
Jacob Collins
I love the C64 and Amiga for many reasons, one of which is the music, so here I'll give you a C64 demo with one of my favourite SID tunes. Take into consideration, that it was made in 1995 and the whole demo is just one file (max filesize on C64 is 50kb) and it works on both PAL and NTSC, a very rare thing.
Levi Flores
...
Christopher Wood
If you want to play around with MIDI composition or just playback, install Rosegarden, Fluidsynth, and look around for some decent sound fonts for Fluidsynth. Some of them have a few good instrument sounds. All free, no hardware required. You might have to dick around a little with Qsynth and Jack, which also get installed as dependencues, but it's trivial. You can just mouse-in tracks on the Rosegarden piano roll. If you read music, you can use Musescore instead of Rosegarden and enter the music notation directly. And of course you can always add a MIDI hardware interface and instrument if you just want to play it in. It's a lot of fun.
Holla Forumstards have been flooding the site and making it much more retarded for a while now. It's amazing what a nosedive in quality Holla Forums boards have had since fucking Holla Forums attracted a horde of idiots who started roosting everywhere and acting like they own the entire website.
