Comment by sotix
Comment by sotix a day ago
What exactly was the difference between PC speakers and MIDI? Why do we no longer need a MIDI device today to play the “correct” sound?
Comment by sotix a day ago
What exactly was the difference between PC speakers and MIDI? Why do we no longer need a MIDI device today to play the “correct” sound?
There's a "correct" sound in that the MIDI standard itself doesn't specify a standard instrument assignment. For that, there's General MIDI but also entirely different approaches (like the MT-32 instrument assignment, which predates General MIDI) and extensions to General MIDI (like Roland's GS and Yamaha's XG). Some didn't have a standard assignment at all (like the FB-01). Even the Adlib and earlier Soundblaster cards didn't have exactly GM compatible MIDI playback drivers; General MIDI specifies a minimum number of 24 simultaneous voices, and an OPL2 or even a pair of them can't satisfy that requirement.
There's also a "correct" sound insofar that the tracks were usually arranged using one sound module or another. Even when devices are compatible in the sense that they have adopted the same standard, hearing music on another device than the one the soundtrack was originally arranged for will cause some degradation, because the standards are only loosely specified in terms of timbre, volume levels, envelopes etc.
Some DOS games have specific arrangements for a variety of different kinds of MIDI devices for these reasons, with different mix levels and instrument setup, sometimes scaled down arrangements, adjustments for the instrument patches and even loading entirely new patches onto the devices.
Pinball Fantasies was actually quite impressive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb8mLBa3dcg
There were two games that I remember had pretty good sound on the PC speaker, one was a golfing game which had like bird whistles and voices, the other was a 2d side scroller with voice acting, iirc it said "jesus is here!" when you picked up an extra life or something.
There was also Le Manoir de Mortvielle which had a speak synthesis throughout the whole game and a recorded music as intro, all on the pc speaker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXB8AddxBgM
Modern computers do not have integrated sound synthesis hardware whatsoever, there has been no point in shipping that since the start of the 21st century. Unfortunately, that does mean that for playing legacy General MIDI content, users are stuck with poor quality software implementations like Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth and the (modern successor of the) QuickTime synthesizer, which were designed for slow computers with little memory in the late 1990's, and were trying not to compete with the high-end hardware of the time (because both license samples from Roland, who made such hardware).
General MIDI as a format basically died for serious computer use in the early 2000's. It's still a feature of some home keyboards and things, but it is a case where they genuinely do not “make them like they used to”. If you want the greatest possible GM support, you have to buy old hardware from e.g. the Roland Sound Canvas or Yamaha MU series, or obtain old software (no longer sold) like Roland Sound Canvas VA or Yamaha S-YXG50.
Most DOS emulators have great support for things like Roland's sound bank ROMs. It's pretty wild to suggest that on today's Windows sometimes the best way to experience MIDI files is to maybe download a questionably illegal ROM and load up a MIDI player written for DOS in DOSBox.
It seems like a missing market for vendors to directly support better sound fonts for Windows, maybe we'd see more files written for it again. But also, there's some sense that most of the best written General MIDI files for direct consumption were always the ones for videogames and it has been left as a matter for emulation for that reason as videogames themselves moved on to different tech.
Still though, there's something about loading Monkey Island 2 with a Roland MT-32 era sound font in DREAMM and experiencing what it does with "live" MIDI instrumentation that modern games wish they could do, and sounds nearly as good doing it. For certain values of nearly, of course. Redbook audio gave us all the lovely little "mistakes" of live band things like jazz performances that MIDI could never quite replicate in the same way. I wouldn't necessarily trade modern orchestration for MIDI in all cases, but it is easy for me to imagine that it might be great to see both side-by-side and the best of both in interactive media, best tool for each job style.
I just now went searching to see if there were any better quality GM drivers for Windows that let you upload a soundfonts and it looks really dire out there! The one that mainly shows up is VirtualMIDISynth (https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth). It seems like it supports Windows 11.
Thanks for the inspiration to dig this up for comparison:
Although I have to admit the cheesy versions do sound more familiar to me because I certainly had the most cheapo-grade sound hardware in any 90s PC I had access to.
"The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice."
I am reminded of Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, which let the PC speaker output something beyond just bleeps and bloops.
So Sony figured out something called a “1-bit DAC”. It’s something like dither, and so was the method of generating voice audio in Mean Streets.
It was composed for at least two, the Windows 3.1 version uses Microsoft's weird MIDI format from that time that contains a simplified version of the arrangement alongside the full version, and which you would hear depends on the configured MIDI Mapper settings.
I think the OP was referring to the difference in synthesizers. It sounds a heck of a lot different on an MT-32 compared to a Sound Blaster: https://youtu.be/0j4uywdNq44
I can play the guitar parts on a banjo but it ain't going to sound right.
In 1900, QRS began making piano rolls. By 1920, they had invented a machine to capture piano players directly and over the years QRS captured many including Liberace, George Gershwin, and even Roger Miller playing Autumn Leaves.
QRS is still in business and some of its product lines use Midi conversions of piano rolls and last month I landed a mixed lot with a bunch of those Midi files on 3.5” floppy disks.
I had George Gershwin rocking a Yamaha XG clavichord and Liberace on a Sitar and similar shenanigans.
When they say "PC Speaker" they mean that thing that beeps when your computer fails to boot being used to play music, not normal speakers vs dedicated midi device.
Yes. 35 years ago, the family PC-clone didn't have any dedicated audio hardware, just the built-in speaker, and that was pretty common. A couple years later, we got a "Sound Blaster" card (more likely, a clone). That provides a FM synthesis chip (typically used for music), and PCM audio output (for sound effects, voice, video playback) that doesn't require constant load on the CPU (it was possible to output scratchy digital audio on the PC Speaker, but CPU-intensive).
If you've heard music from the Sega Genesis, that's the same Yamaha FM Synthesis technology (details differ, of course).
So, games would often support different audio hardware. Here's a favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ (Secret of Monkey Island theme, PC Speaker)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB-HAZsRs (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Adlib/OPL2/FM synthesis, common option for PC sound hardware)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20 (Secret of Monkey Island theme, Roland MT-32/Linear Arithmetic synthesis, premium hardware, likely what the music was originally composed for)
As others have already said, MIDI is a spec and does not contain any actual sounds. General Midi's big thing was probably its defined list of sounds but that was really only a naming convention.
The great thing about MIDI is that it is easily routable to any number of things (physical instruments, samplers, etc.).
Being able to listen to Sonic 2 - Chemical Zone with a combination of a Minimoog Model D and a Jun-6 (basically a Juno-6) is unbelievably fun.
The PC speaker could only play square waves, and had only one voice.
There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file as it's just note and tempo data. But many people probably associate them with the OPL2 synthesizer chip on AdLib and early SoundBlaster cards. [1]
Now that we have high fidelity digital sound output on even the cheapest computers/devices, at least 44 kHz, at least two channels, and at least 16 bits per sample, we can emulate (or play a recording of) anything.
[1] Personally I remember this midi file sounding different/better. Maybe because I'm remembering using a Sound Blaster AWE64 while playing these things in Windows?