Canyon.mid

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.

> 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.

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.

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

Simply because games these days are exactly designed to extract dopamine from people, and in the 90s they were mostly driven by pain.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8T5pyGiTPdE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ

I went through a phase in high school of MIDI arrangements of songs I liked. Including crazy guitar solo music.

Good times.

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?

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.

That’s not the Microsoft/Roland sound.

It's 2/3 audio and 1/3 video - 1.1MB.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, most video codecs aren't tremendously efficient with static screens.

Because the quality drop is imperceptible for most people, but the convenience of having volume controls at the component that makes sound isn't.

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.

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.

mods are still alive, and crazier than ever -- proof that 4 channels is all you need! https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/?file=ma-205456