Re: CRAP Poll: My Mouse Is...

On Sun, 02 Jun 2024 21:32:22 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
...

Do any of you still listen to MIDIs? I do once in a while: http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/files/music/music.html
That includes MOD, S3M, XM, IT, 669, FAR, etc. ;)

>

On occassion, yes. I /love/ Michael "Keyboard Wizard" Walthius'
creations. There are some really good Sierra Online video-game
soundtracks too (the latter sound better on the Roland, of course).

>

I more often listen to tracker music (MOD, S3M, etc) these days,
although even there I tend to cheat (the ones I like the most got
transcribed to MP3 and tossed in the mix with all my other music). But
I still make semi-frequent visits to the MOD archive to discover new
stuff. Then I just fire up ModPlug, drag a bunch of files over to it,
and bippity-bop my way through whatever daily task I have to finish
;-)

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ModPlug Player is awesome.
>
>

Keyboard Wizard
https://www.audiosparx.com/keyboardwizard

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Sierra Online MIDI soundtracks
https://www.midimusicadventures.com/queststudios/midi-soundtracks/complete-soundtracks/

>

MOD Archive
https://modarchive.org/

>

MODPlug Player
https://www.modplug.com/

>
Question: What's the best MIDI SoftSynth to use?

I couldn't answer that any more. Back-in-the-day (as in, back when
Windows 95 and 98 were the new hotness), I played around with a bunch
of them but I haven't kept up. If I were to dig around, I probably
could find the discs for whatever I used (I think one was a Roland
SoftSynth, and another was a Yamaha XG-something) but which ones
specifically - and how they compared to others - I couldn't say. I
doubt they'd even run on modern hardware (although maybe I should give
it a try). Anyway, I'm sure there's a lot better available than any of
the ancient stuff I used to be familiar with.

Mostly, if I want to play MIDI I just rely on TiMIDIty
(https://timidity.sourceforge.net/) and whatever hundred-megabyte
patchset I downloaded years ago. It works well enough for most stuff
(although some XG/GM/Roland-specific stuff sounds a bit off). There's
also a Roland MT-32 emulator (although you'd need the ROMs for those)
if you want to play old-school Roland stuff. It isn't very good -being
forty-year tech- but if you want to experience what games sounded like
in the 80s and 90s, it's a cool tool.