Slashdot Mirror

Been done before !
http://www.taws.ch/WB.html
http://www.chiptune.com/?again...

Just as an addition to the above post, I stumbled upon this site the other day and was rather impressed by it - http://www.chiptune.com/

It brought back a lot of memories of the Amiga and for those of you who have no idea what Workbench looked like, it's a quick way of playing around without having to install anything.

Check out this. . .

http://www.chiptune.com/

Amiga Workbench in HTML 5! (At least a cosmetic version, but you get the idea.)

If you dig around, you'll find that somebody, somewhere who cares will have ported some version of it along. I remember hankering for one of my old and obscure Apple ][ games and I actually found the darned thing along with an emulator. (Rescue Raiders).

-FL

I'm thinking, port it to JavaScript...

I think you're looking at the wrong technology. Some of those linked sites to the hacked up MIDIs are cool and everything, but MIDIs have their limitations and they seem like a particularly clumsy technology to me.

What MIDIs these days do is work with a set of digital samples then apply fancy transformations to the PCM data to give you instruments with different pitches, frequencies, etc. My first big problem with this is that MIDI is pretty much stuck with a single set of samples for the instruments unless you use something like Creative's SoundFont where you can change the sound of every instrument in the set. The problem being is that now you can't distribute the original MIDI and expect a consistent listening experience from all of your users. You're forced to record the audio to an MP3 or something on your machine before distributing it.

Which leads me to my next point. Incase you were not aware, a new type of music has existed since the days of the Amiga that fixes the problems of the gimped MIDI standard. I'm talking about digital modules (MOD, S3M, IT, XM, 669, etc.) These modules work on the same priniciples as MIDI but they have some distinct advantages:

• Runs on the cheap hardware and low end systems. Just needs a sound card capable of.. Outputting sound..
• The digital samples used for the music are saved within the file itself. Sounds the same on everyone's system.
• Better quality than MIDIs if they're done right. Some formats (XM and IT especially) have some pretty slick advnaced features for instruments.
• The audio processing for most of these is fast enough to be run in real time alongside some other processor consuming task. (Doesn't really matter these days, however.)

My second largest problem with MIDI back in the day was that by comparison, the software MIDI emulators drained the computer of most of its resources.

So there you have it. I recommend diving into this world instead and stay clear of those icky MIDIs. Here are some resources if you don't know where to get started:

• MODPlug Central popluar player and tracker. And yes, you can use your MIDI keyboard to compose music with a lot of these trackers.
• Nectarine Shoutcast streams of a lot of these modules
• The Mod Archive Could forget the good old MOD Archive! A modern repository for this type of music.
• chiptune.com A great resource for Chiptunes! (really, really small modules.) And music in other formats (including Adlib music.)
• Aminet Has a lot of the older ("classic") modules that first appeared on the Amiga with the popular ProTracker
• Fasttracker 2 Just for completeness. The trakcer that introduced the XM file format. The same functionality is in ModPlug tracker.
• Impulse Tracker Included for completeness. Another excellent tracker like Fasttracker. Introduced the IT file format. The same functionality exists in ModPlug tracker.
• ScreamTracker Only including a link to information about it because of the nostaliga involved with it. It's lacking in the features that Fasttracker and Impluse Tracker have but it's really easy to use.
• The Hornet Archive Another nostaliga site. Music and programs from the Demoscene.

Also, if you're interested, there has been some development relatively recently with "Buzz trakcers"(?) I don't have as much knowledge with these but from what I saw with Jeskola Buzz, it's really very

Reminds me of Hubbard, JCL, and all the chip artists who brought about a revolution in gaming music.

Brings a tear to my eye. Long live the SID6581!

chiptune.com

I prefer listening to musicians who play music because they enjoy it, not for the money.

Time to dump CD's and go back to the MOD scene

Acapella version of MULE theme

Almost original version of MULE theme

On the 8th day, God made the SID and rested

sid rocks while coding ... .and delta, this tune really kick ass. (and I didn't even have a c64) for really computer sounding music, gotta check www.chiptune.com this site got all styles of chip modules, synthetic ones...