Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI(vgmusic.com) |
Gameboy music and sound archive for MIDI(vgmusic.com) |
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).
This site is one of the pillars grounding me to the reality that once was the internet.
It turns out that the ringtone is procedurly generated by the phone in realtime, and no such a file exists.
It sad to learn that not everything we make can be stored for high fidelity reproducibility later on.
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...
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.
Edit: Wingroove also works on Wine!
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.
There's also apparently a Wingroove SF that people have made too. This is awesome.
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!!
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.
Unfortunately I know of no such emulators for Mac or Linux.
In the case of gameboy games, the music data is usually provided in the "gameboy sound" format, with a .gbs file extension.
https://www.zophar.net/music/gameboy-gbs
GBS players typically take the form of a plugin or component for your audio player of choice.
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.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MIDI#GStreamer-based_player...
I'm using Fedora rn, so I adjusted the packages names and did something similar to the arch wiki, so I'm not sure the closest ones for Ubuntu.
I find VLC ugly, but if you can live with it, just install the vlc plugin like a sibling post here said.
Fluidsynth is amazing and I'm using it to emulate a decent enough synth for dosbox games.
But crude. I do not know media player style frontends.
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.
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.