[HN Gopher] Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI
___________________________________________________________________
Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI
Author : BramLovesYams
Score : 152 points
Date : 2023-12-20 09:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vgmusic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vgmusic.com)
| jader201 wrote:
| Oh dang. I uploaded a version of Mario Kart 64's Rainbow Road --
| the one that's listed as "(Extended Version) (v2.0)". [1]
|
| This was probably from 1996/97. Not only do they still have it,
| but the site hasn't changed at all since then! What a kick of
| nostalgia!
|
| Edit: actually I checked the comments which shows the upload
| time, and either I'm remembering about 6 years off, or the
| timestamp was updated somehow (if it was transferred from another
| location).
|
| [1] http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/n64/
| mrWiz wrote:
| Mario Kart 64 was released between Dec '96 and June '97
| (depending on region) so either you were very quick to create
| the MIDI version or the dates you remember are off.
| dqv wrote:
| https://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/gamecube/miro...
|
| It's not the best, but this is how I listened to it before they
| got uploaded to youtube. And no, the Miror B theme in XD is _not_
| better than the OG Colosseum version!!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Sucks that I can't seem to listen to these on mobile. Does iOS
| Safari not ship with a midi player?
| hcarrega wrote:
| Try this https://apps.apple.com/app/id393964792
| ace2358 wrote:
| This app looks great. Any recommendations on where to get
| files compatible with this?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oh wow. An app that you just pay for once and that's it. I'm
| in love.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Midi has been kinda dying - android can't play them out of the
| box either, nor Ubuntu.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| For the uninitiated: MIDI is a fundamentally different
| ideology of storing sound compared to MP3, AAC, and so on.
| Whereas MP3 and their brethren store actual sound data, MIDI
| stores what is most easily described as musical scores.
|
| When you play a MIDI file, you are expected to literally
| provide the musical instruments to play the musical score
| with. In the past this was provided by your sound card with a
| synthesizer, and in more recent times provided by your
| operating system as a software synthesizer.
|
| The reason behind MIDI being structured this way was to
| reduce file size. Remember, we are talking the 1980s when
| MIDI was invented; disk space was _expensive_. Storing the
| raw sound data requires a lot of space, but MIDI only needs
| to store the musical scores which are significantly smaller.
| The actual sounds were stored locally and synthesized by the
| sound card.
|
| In an era where disk space is worth pennies, MIDI is an
| obsolete solution for a problem of a bygone age. But the
| technical considerations and compromises that went into its
| design and the innovative creations that composers made
| within the technical restrictions imposed are nonetheless a
| hallmark of computing history.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| I'd say the openness of the format deserves more
| recognition and is far from obsolete. Its rightful
| successor is tracker music, which includes the instrument
| samples along with the musical score. Pure waveform is a
| lot like closed-source software, with many inherent
| drawbacks.
| bzzzt wrote:
| MIDI was designed as a way to link up a controller like a
| piano keyboard to a synthesizer and transmit the notes
| being played. In that area it's certainly not obsolete:
| synthesizers still transmit and receive MIDI messages and
| sequencer software still records them. It's the only sane
| way to edit and view note data because you can't edit audio
| easily to change a few notes.
|
| As a way of transmitting musical scores it's obsolete, but
| mostly because it was really hard to get MIDI soundtracks
| to sound as intended because there were so many different
| synthesizer implementations.
| phero_cnstrcts wrote:
| Is it just midi? Did the Gameboy come with its own default sound
| samples?
| Dwedit wrote:
| VGMusic.com is fan-made midi files that try to recreate the
| music of the games.
|
| If you are looking for something that's real and actually from
| the games, you want music rips. These include NSF files (NES),
| GBS files (Game Boy and Game Boy Color), VGM files (Master
| System and Genesis), GSF files (Game Boy Advance), USF files
| (Nintendo 64), PSF files (Playstation), and several others.
| herrherrmann wrote:
| You can also find a lot of soundtracks ripped from the
| consoles on archive.org! These are usually wav or mp3 files,
| i.e. more usual and supported formats.
| strongly-typed wrote:
| I contributed a few midis to that site back in the day. Chrono
| Cross band arrangement of Scar of Time, a FFX battle theme, a
| Secret of Mana "into the thick of it", and an organ piece from
| one the Ys games.
|
| This site is one of the pillars grounding me to the reality that
| once was the internet.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| It's been months since I started looking for the file for the
| Chirp1 ringtone in Cisco phones, to no avail.
|
| It turns out that the ringtone is procedurly generated by the
| phone in realtime, and no such a file exists.
|
| It sad to learn that not everything we make can be stored for
| high fidelity reproducibility later on.
| ace2358 wrote:
| Do you have a recording of it you can share for those of us who
| have never been in a corporate environment :)
| snvzz wrote:
| Best listened to with suit and tie cosplay, to get into the
| role of corporate employee.
| snvzz wrote:
| There's always sampling, which should be audibly transparent
| with even late 80s technology.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| A lot of Console music is distributed as the machine code that
| is fed to the synthesizer chip. Emulators have been built to
| faithfully reproduce that sound from the same code.
|
| You'd have to build an emulator for the Cisco phone and extract
| the code that generates that sound. I'd wager it's just a
| routine in ARM that is creating the sound on the main CPU...
| theogravity wrote:
| I just started using Linux on my new Framework laptop, and I'm
| really enjoying the experience so far since it doesn't feel too
| different from MacOS for me. However, there doesn't seem to be a
| de-facto MIDI player for the desktop when I did a search for it.
|
| What should I install for Ubuntu to listen to the files?
|
| The last amazing player I've used when I was a kid was WinGroove
| for Windows 3.11. Had an amazing software-based synth and I have
| never found anything close to it since.
|
| Edit: Wingroove also works on Wine!
| Dwedit wrote:
| For Windows, I find "Soundfont Midi Player"
| https://falcosoft.hu/softwares.html#midiplayer to be the best
| choice. It uses a Bassmidi based player with a provided
| soundfont, and MIDI files sound great on it.
|
| It even loads tracker music, converting it to MIDI and
| Soundfont files. It also supports MIDI files which use
| unconventional instruments, as long as there is a soundfont
| file in the directory to pick. Useful for GBA music rips.
|
| I have not tested it on Wine.
|
| ---
|
| Alternatively, download the SF2 file from that page, and
| configure VLC Media Player to use that SF2 file. The setting
| may be hidden unless you enter advanced mode for configuration.
| theogravity wrote:
| Soundfont Midi Player works with wine, thanks so much!
|
| There's also apparently a Wingroove SF that people have made
| too. This is awesome.
| snvzz wrote:
| fluidsynth is what I use.
|
| But crude. I do not know media player style frontends.
| atoav wrote:
| VLC player should be able to do this if you install the
| fluidsynth addon: https://askubuntu.com/questions/128763/midi-
| files-not-workin...
| massifist wrote:
| You might want to check out FluidSynth if you don't mind a
| command line application. I don't think it has a graphical
| interface but it can run in the background, so you might be
| able to use it with other applications which do.
| rodrigodlu wrote:
| If you're using gnome as desktop, you should seek for gstreamer
| compatible plugins:
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MIDI#GStreamer-based_player...
|
| I'm using Fedora rn, so I adjusted the packages names and did
| something similar to the arch wiki, so I'm not sure the closest
| ones for Ubuntu.
|
| I find VLC ugly, but if you can live with it, just install the
| vlc plugin like a sibling post here said.
|
| Fluidsynth is amazing and I'm using it to emulate a decent
| enough synth for dosbox games.
| vishnuharidas wrote:
| They should embed a MIDI player like this:
| https://cifkao.github.io/html-midi-player/
| nness wrote:
| I've created a Tampermonkey script to do just that:
| https://gist.github.com/lachlanmcdonald/b2d9663fdb13fc1df820...
|
| It mostly works -- except I've noticed that html-midi-player
| will continue to play the last note if there's any kind of
| delay set, which is jarring. html-midi-player doesn't seem to
| expose a JavaScript API to make any of it simple...
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Why not just a simple <embed> and let the browser handle it? Or
| do modern browsers not handle MIDI anymore?
| _flux wrote:
| I wouldn't expect browsers to come with a General MIDI patch
| set..
| thesuitonym wrote:
| In the 90s and early 00s, that's pretty much all the embed
| tag was for. Other formats were too big.
| pajko wrote:
| https://github.com/feross/timidity
| nness wrote:
| No support -- seems neither <embed> nor <audio> can play the
| midi format.
| ninjin wrote:
| Oh my, this really sends me down memory lane. It must have been
| around 1996 when I spent a substantial amount of time downloading
| and listening to VGMusic. Back then I was on dial up and would
| continue to be for another five years or so. Thus, MP3s were
| expensive to get and it would take a good portion of an hour to
| download a single one anyway. With Midi I could get entire tracks
| in a few seconds, plug them into Winamp, and be on my merry way.
| iamjackg wrote:
| I had a similar experience with tool-assisted speedruns! Videos
| were huge and had terrible quality, but I could just download a
| small "movie" file for an emulator and watch the game play
| itself with superhuman skills.
| nness wrote:
| For a similar blast-from-the-past -- https://ocremix.org/
| ahuhz wrote:
| Absolutely loved OC ReMix when I was younger. Their collection
| of remixes were some of the best. Still go back to listen to
| some of the old stuff from there sometimes.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Those enjoying this might also like https://c64audio.com/ . If
| only I could find the archives of the KDVS chiptunes show from
| the mid-90's....
| thesuitonym wrote:
| For those interested in this sort of thing, you can download
| chiptunes from ocremix.org that can run in a musical emulator
| like ChipAmp.
|
| Unfortunately I know of no such emulators for Mac or Linux.
| keyneus wrote:
| At least Audacious (in its audacious-plugins package) as well
| as Qmmp support chiptunes via the Game_Music_Emu library. I'd
| imagine many other plugin-based players for Linux/Unix have
| support as well.
| RunSet wrote:
| Also for those interested in this sort of thing, it is possible
| to extract the music data from a ROM and play it back using a
| program that emulates only the console's sound hardware.
|
| In the case of gameboy games, the music data is usually
| provided in the "gameboy sound" format, with a .gbs file
| extension.
|
| https://www.zophar.net/music/gameboy-gbs
|
| https://gbs.joshw.info/
|
| GBS players typically take the form of a plugin or component
| for your audio player of choice.
| everdrive wrote:
| I spent a LOT of time here in the 1990s. I used to have VERY
| spotty dial-up, and I would download my favorite music both
| before MP3s were really a thing, and also when downloading MP3s
| just wasn't feasible on my very poor internet connection. This is
| one of the major sites responsible for my love of music. All I
| had available to me otherwise was the the MTV countdown, and
| whatever garbage my friends were listening to.
| jdlyga wrote:
| vgmusic.com was my bread and butter 20 years ago. I had such a
| big midi collection. That was until I discovered nsf and spc
| files that reproduced the sound accurately, then later on mp3s
| and still later video game music on Spotify.
| Subdivide8452 wrote:
| Oh my God. I used to grab MIDI's from here in my mid to late 90s
| game development days. This opened up a chamber in my brain that
| had been closed for 20+ years.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-21 23:02 UTC)