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).
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.
I actually checked and found the original .mid file on my NAS. Looks like the file itself was from 11/1997, so I'm guessing I uploaded it a few years later, or for some reason the upload data was changed.
I did it by ear. I was never creative, so I never was good at creating anything original. But I was often able to listen to songs and break apart each instrument and notes, and had tons of fun transposing some of my favorite songs.
Of course, more complex songs with very subtle instruments or phrases were harder to replicate, but I was often able to get it fairly close.
Not surprisingly, playing Rock Band for many years has improved my ability to hear the more subtle instruments/notes, but I don’t do as much midi transposing as I used to.
I’ve not listened to the Rainbow Road midi in a while, so curious if I can pick out mistakes or things I missed now with a bit more experience.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That was one of the things I did when I added audio support to my NES emulator; add NSF support as a mapper with some special case code (doesn't display video, uses controller inputs to switch tracks). It seems like it only took me a couple of hours to add.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/