Hacker News Reader

Comment by tleb_ | Hacker News Reader

Playing a MIDI file isn't a straight forward task! To me, it feels akin to sharing an image without telling its colour space.

View on HN

General MIDI solved a lot of (but not all) the colorspace issue. It came out in 1991 and is good enough in the way cover bands are good enough.

when Sound Blaster came out with SoundFonts and the AWE32 they really made .MID files shine. Old MID files that sounded pretty bad on a previous Sound Blaster or AdLib suddenly sounded amazing.

And you think, wouldn't it be cool if the .MID contained the SoundFont? And... you get .MOD files, which were unfortunately seen as this weird demo scene format but were quietly doing things the music industry had not gotten around to yet. It was MID that would sound identical on any machine you played it on (assuming said machine had PCM playback)

The shortcoming, I think, was file size for the samples. I mean 2MB was about average RAM for a new home PC in 1996 and sampled sounds at 16bits x 44 kHz would eat that up pretty fast.

That means putting them in ROM and that means compliant hardware or CDROM latency.

Tracker music definitely had its day in computer games, and around the same time a lot of sample-based music was happening on video game consoles. There was just a pretty short amount of time for software or hardware sampling to shine before games started being shipped on CDs with more than enough room for full orchestral recordings and whatnot. I still notice tracker music in indie games every once in a while, and one of the bigger sound middlewares in games today had its origins there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMOD

Well, General MIDI exists to define what most MIDI files mean musically.

Not sure what you mean by colour space but you should be able to tell it the type of instrument to play.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com