[HN Gopher] A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10
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A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10
Author : zdw
Score : 123 points
Date : 2024-05-19 16:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nicole.express)
(TXT) w3m dump (nicole.express)
| sublinear wrote:
| > In this, the year 2025, minijack MIDI is now fairly common, but
| in the 90's it was all DIN, all the time
| infotainment wrote:
| I'm guessing this was meant to be a joke about how everyone is
| still using the DIN connector for midi? Kind of confusing.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Lots of smaller or portable synthesizers use a 3,5mm TRS
| connector for MIDI. It's badly standardised though: there are
| different wirings depending on the manufacturer.
| mkesper wrote:
| DIN MIDI connectors have the advantage to use mandatory
| optocuplers so no ground loops etc.
| petesoper wrote:
| If you're in 2025 we have a few questions for you.
| NikkiA wrote:
| In 1996 Yamaha was all about TwinVQ (which was far better than
| mp3 at low bitrates) anyway, so it'd have been that rather than
| mp3, had they gone that route.
| squarefoot wrote:
| When General MIDI standard sounds became widespread in early-mid
| 90s I already wet my feet with synthesizers, samplers and the
| Amiga .MOD scene, so I was eager to try this new format and its
| standard library of sounds, but was surprised how absolutely
| awful they sounded compared to pretty much everything I used,
| cheap keyboards included. No way I would swap any of my cheap
| synthesizers with a MT32 or any similar expander. I may have a
| very unpopular opinion, but hated those sounds since day one, and
| still hate them. The demos linked sound just terrible to my ears;
| you can't make a general purpose sound and expect it to fit any
| song in any genre as much as you can't have a single type of
| cheese and expect it to be good in all meals. I completely
| understand the reason why they existed, but no, I don't feel any
| nostalgia.
| ElectricBoogie wrote:
| It's a common misconception that GM has to sound bad. Consumer
| GM units used the smallest sound ROMs they could get away with,
| lower quality DACs, etc. But you could fire up GM on your
| Kurzweil K2000, your Quadrasynth, your Roland, or Yamaha
| professional level synthesizers and workstations and the same
| GM programs would sound amazing.
|
| For less than a higher end Sound Canvas, you can get a real
| professional synth with a much bigger and better sound ROM,
| better DACs, better effects, etc.
| brudgers wrote:
| Right.
|
| General Midi specified a set of instruments and standard
| program values to select them. For example 0 (or one
| depending on where you start counting) is will be a piano.
| Just as pianos vary in timbre, so can the instruments among
| various GM devices.
| jasomill wrote:
| Not just "could"; e.g., Yamaha's latest workstations, with
| gigabytes of samples, still support General MIDI[1].
|
| [1] https://usa.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/7/2172
| 427...
| bzzzt wrote:
| The problem you get replacing the instrument sounds with
| those from a better synth is they will sound different and
| often out of balance (certain instruments too quiet or loud
| or the timbre not fitting in). I believe there were a few
| projects trying to create a "sound font" to give optimal MIDI
| sound to early 90s DOS games.
| klodolph wrote:
| Yes, that's a problem. Working from the other direction...
| one of the big things about General MIDI is that if you
| want to write a song, you know which sounds are available
| so you can compose a GM track and then take it to some
| nicer gear and fine-tune it there. Maybe you write your
| track on a MT-32 or SC-88 at home, and then bring the MIDI
| file into a studio where they've got a JV-1080. Your music
| won't be balanced, but it will at least be intelligible,
| with the correct instruments playing in the correct octave.
| ElectricBoogie wrote:
| Game composers usually composed their music on a MIDI
| workstation keyboard, sometimes only preparing a final mix
| on a Sound Canvas (or GUS etc). So it may be that using a
| higher end synthesizer is closer to the way the developer
| intended the music to be.
|
| I don't think this is a huge problem though, waveforms on
| sound ROMs are normalized so their peak loudness is as loud
| as she goes, no matter what the synthesizer. Even Sound
| Canvas models have different sound ROMs over time, and
| Gravis (and later, Creative et al) shipped enhanced GM
| sound fonts as well. I just like instruments to sound more
| authentic. I understand though if people want that Roland
| Sound Canvas sound too, or MT32 even. MT32 still can't be
| properly emulated. I own the real deal and it sounds much
| better than MUNT. Hats off to the MUNT team but like most
| (all?) software emulations of hardware synthesizers,
| something is missing.
| an-unknown wrote:
| If you need some real world examples, here is a recording of
| "One Stop" from a few different professional synthesizers
| (Roland JV-1080, XV-5080, INTEGRA-7, and KORG X5DR) to get an
| idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7wRCvWLm2o
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My sister's a musician and when I bought the adapter to hook
| her keyboard-synth to my Sound Blaster and fired up Wing
| Commander II, I was blown away by the sound track. It didn't
| hurt that the speakers on the keyboard were far better than
| the 5W speakers that I originally got with my Sound Blaster
| 2.0
| Max-q wrote:
| I totally agree with you. I hated them from day one. Sounds to
| clean and polished.
| jader201 wrote:
| I think things changed a bit with MIDI with the introduction of
| Soundfonts, and even more with dedicated MIDI sound cards.
|
| I bought a Roland SCC-1 [1], and fell in love with MIDI. It was
| basically a CM-300 in a PCI card. I could program music that
| sounded like it was coming from a Roland keyboard. Such good
| memories.
|
| But like you, I also was not a fan of FM produced MIDI, and
| that was only exacerbated by the SCC-1.
|
| Soundfonts made it possible for games like FF7 to sound
| identical to the PS1, which was miles ahead of FM MIDI.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_SC-55
| emchammer wrote:
| FM synthesis on consumer MIDI sound cards only sounded dull
| because it had fewer operators than a professional
| synthesizer.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| From my perspective it was exactly the opposite. FM synths
| were great because they sounded like synths. Some of the most
| memorable game soundtracks of the era were that precisely
| because they had such a characteristic sound to them. When
| high-quality sampled sounds became the norm, there was
| nothing unique about game music any more, it just sounded
| like any other soundtrack. Might as well just play a CD at
| that point.
|
| The MT-32, from what I understand, was based on the D-50
| series, which means in theory it should have had access to
| unique patches like DigitalNativeDance. The problem with
| General MIDI is that it limited patches to the lowest common
| denominator, so even if a ROMpler had the potential to make
| interesting sounds, composers would stick to the generic ones
| for compatibility. I think it's no surprise the Sound Blaster
| (with CD-ROM interface) won over General MIDI in the end,
| because that way composers could record on professional
| equipment and everyone would hear it the same. It's too bad
| that it also ushered in the era of "game music" just being
| orchestral scores, pop music etc.
| bzzzt wrote:
| I think the move to 'plain' digital audio has been
| liberating. It still is possible to create a game
| soundtrack on an FM synthesizer, so there's nothing lost
| except the headaches of incompatible sound card
| implementations.
|
| If a game really needs to have a 'true' synthesizer it's
| easy enough to make use of a good software emulation now.
| jader201 wrote:
| I see what you're saying, and partially agree.
|
| However, FM synth on PC sound cards, IMO, sounded pretty
| awful. I would prefer 8-bit NES synth over that of PC
| synth. E.g. while I do have some nostalgia from the
| Canon.mid file, I still thought it sounded relatively bad,
| compared to NES or SNES voices.
|
| I felt the same about the Genesis, which I think used
| similar synth to older PC FM synth. I always felt that the
| SNES voices (or even NES 8-bit) sounded far better compared
| to the Genesis.
|
| But ack this is subjective.
| belthesar wrote:
| Ironically, the SNES's SPC unit was essentially a very
| resource constrained ROMpler. While it was capable of
| synthesis like the NES (in fact, many early third party
| SNES titles used this, as devs migrating to the platform
| were more familiar with making music in this style), the
| ability to load samples and play them back is why so many
| folks hail it as the console with superior sound of its
| generation. The YM-2612 in the Genesis did indeed enable
| composers to create some legendary soundtracks of their
| own (Anyone who doesn't know Yuzo Koshiro's work for
| example might enjoy Charles Cornell's dive into the OST
| of Streets of Rage [1]), the best OSTs for the console
| were in styles that lent themselves to embrace the sound
| of the chip, where the SNES, leveraging the ROMpler
| model, allowed it to make rich music across many more
| genres.
|
| Speaking of ROMplers and the SNES, these inexpensive
| ROMplers from Roland and Korg were what much of the music
| of these consoles were made on, with many of the SNES
| soundfonts bing made up of highly truncated versions of
| the ROMpler's samples. The sound of second, third, and
| fourth generation Final Fantasy games as composed by
| Nobuo Uematsu heavily used the Roland SoundCanvas SC-55,
| with the final title he was lead composer on, Final
| Fantasy 10, essentially using fully rendered tracks using
| the platform, with then-modern arrangement and production
| techniques instead of the soundfont + tracker-style music
| programming used on the SNES and PS1 titles (the PS1's
| SPU is essentially a souped up SPC700, hearkening back to
| its roots as the SNES CD, allowing developers to make
| music in much the same way, albeit with higher resolution
| samples, more channels, and more effects).
|
| To your point though, the the Genesis' YM-2612, in
| Yamaha's OPN family was a similar chip to the Yamaha OPL-
| family chips used by the SoundBlaster platform, albeit it
| featured complex FM operators that wouldn't be seen on
| SoundBlaster cards until the versions with "OPL 3" chips
| became prevalent, which was inconsistent on the SB16
| family.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cx73EOaGWU
| radiowave wrote:
| There's a lot from the D-50 that's missing on an MT-32,
| like 50% of the ROM capacity, and all of the filters and
| effects.
|
| And on top of that, DigitalNativeDance is an outlier. It
| was (for its day) such a profligate use of ROM that it's
| not even representative of what a _D-50_ could do, in
| general.
|
| Not that this contradicts your main point about GM
| constraining the choice of sounds.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > as much as you can't have a single type of cheese and expect
| it to be good in all meals
|
| You clearly haven't tried Kerrygold's Dubliner cheese, then ;)
| lproven wrote:
| That's what I thought!
|
| Compared to how many people, in many countries, use cheese,
| this sounds like an audiophile complaint.
|
| Sure, yes, for tens or hundreds of millions of people, cheese
| is just cheese and a medium cheddar type cheese is
| interchangeable with any other in any recipe.
|
| Similarly massive world-famous tracks, and entire music
| genres, have been built upon the built-in preprogrammed
| rhythm tracks of a few cheap 1970s Japanese home keyboards.
| Whole types of music where nobody involved can read notation,
| or play a chord, or possibly play an instrument at all.
|
| In the light of this, I found this comment elitist and snooty
| and patronising in the extreme, TBH.
|
| Of _course_ you can make good music around super limited
| basic sound samples. To deny this is to deny arguably a
| double-digit percentage of all popular music since the 1960s
| or '70s.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Agreed, the MT32 sounded very bad, but it inspired a scene of
| MIDI enthusiasts and companies making countless MIDI song files
| for popular and classical music that travelled via floppy discs
| and bulletin board systems. And the MT32 was kind of GM before
| GM - and its drum note assignments can still be found in the
| bones of some of the most recent and ambitious beat making
| plugins.
|
| So I value the MT32 as an historic technology culture enabler,
| rather than as a sonic treasure.
|
| That being said, I should run mine through my guitar pedalboard
| and see if it can be made to sound cool. :-)
| bambax wrote:
| I don't feel any nostalgia either but I do remember you could
| find specific soundfonts for specific sounds, and some of those
| sounded very good.
| nedrylandJP wrote:
| Even more useful once your MIDI files are organized.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVYtkh-LO4
| k12sosse wrote:
| SON, YOU KNOW THOSE MIDI FILES AREN'T SORTED!
|
| Was glad to see this already here. Never before - or since -
| has the Tulley Toggle found a more appropriate use.
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