Ansiplay.js – Simple ANSI Music Player based on Ansiplay.exe | Hacker News Reader

Ansiplay.js – Simple ANSI Music Player based on Ansiplay.exe

andyherbert.github.io

15 pointsandy_herbert8 comments

For the confused people using Safari who are wondering what this website is about: This website doesn't work on Safari. There should be audio when you select a file. Before you try it in another browser turn down your volume though...

For the author: There's no console error either though (which is normally the case when there's issues with audio permissions, often an issue in Safari), so I'm not sure what's wrong.

Volume warning, please.

Not helped by the nonsensical UX. Why would a user expect changing a selection in a dropdown to start playing sound?

I know UX isn't the name of the game here, but I think that's the part that made me shit myself

Absolutely this.

I have my headphones at what I consider to be a reasonable volume level, yet this website was so loud that my ears are ringing.

Is it just on my end or is there some explanation for the (perceived?) higher volume?

Agree. I was listening to something else which had reasonable volume and this absolutely blasted my ears at an uncomfortable level.

Doesn't seem to work for me in Chrome (Version 81.0.4044.138 (Official Build) (64-bit) Linux). I have no issues playing other sound within Chrome.

Never really heard of Ansiplay but skimmed over the JS code. Is it like a MOD format? I noticed the octaves table and some sort of mixer...

Never heard of ansiplay.exe. Was it known

I don't think it was ever well-known.

The basic idea: if you've ever used Microsoft BASICs (on DOS, that was BASICA, GW-BASIC, QBASIC, QuickBasic etc), you might have come across the PLAY statement. It lets you play simple music using a text string composed of notes ("ABC", etc) and various commands (e.g. change octave, change tempo, etc). Well, why couldn't ANSI.SYS provide ANSI-style escape sequences equivalent to the BASIC PLAY statement? Well, it could, but it doesn't. So the author of ANSIPLAY (Julie Ibarra) designed an ESC sequence syntax to do this and then wrote a program to interpret it. (Unlike ANSI.SYS, it isn't a device driver, so it doesn't allow arbitrary programs to play music using escape sequences – but it will interpret these sequences in a file.)

(Looking at how it has been done... the structure of the escape sequences defined for ANSIPLAY isn't really compatible with ECMA-48 / ANSI X3.64 – but I imagine the author probably wasn't familiar with those standards back in 1991 when this was written – back in those days, information on these standards was much harder to come by than it is today.)

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