A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10

https://nicole.express/2024/elementary-midi-watson.html

by zdw • 2 years ago

132 32 2 years ago

sublinear• 2 years ago

In this, the year 2025, minijack MIDI is now fairly common, but in the 90’s it was all DIN, all the time

I'm guessing this was meant to be a joke about how everyone is still using the DIN connector for midi? Kind of confusing.

bzzzt4• 2 years ago

Lots of smaller or portable synthesizers use a 3,5mm TRS connector for MIDI. It's badly standardised though: there are different wirings depending on the manufacturer.

mkesper• 2 years ago

DIN MIDI connectors have the advantage to use mandatory optocuplers so no ground loops etc.

petesoper• 2 years ago

If you're in 2025 we have a few questions for you.

ngcc_hk• 2 years ago

Time loop is hard … do you have to wait until 2025 for your question to appear in his timeline … nothing run faster than speed of light, even time?

Or as he is in 2025, he saw everything keep on changing due to the ripple of his disruption of timeline.

Or as back2future postulate it is a different future and hence back to the speed of light issue.

Hard.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

In 1996 Yamaha was all about TwinVQ (which was far better than mp3 at low bitrates) anyway, so it'd have been that rather than mp3, had they gone that route.

squarefoot• 2 years ago

When General MIDI standard sounds became widespread in early-mid 90s I already wet my feet with synthesizers, samplers and the Amiga .MOD scene, so I was eager to try this new format and its standard library of sounds, but was surprised how absolutely awful they sounded compared to pretty much everything I used, cheap keyboards included. No way I would swap any of my cheap synthesizers with a MT32 or any similar expander. I may have a very unpopular opinion, but hated those sounds since day one, and still hate them. The demos linked sound just terrible to my ears; you can't make a general purpose sound and expect it to fit any song in any genre as much as you can't have a single type of cheese and expect it to be good in all meals. I completely understand the reason why they existed, but no, I don't feel any nostalgia.

ElectricBoogie2• 2 years ago

It's a common misconception that GM has to sound bad. Consumer GM units used the smallest sound ROMs they could get away with, lower quality DACs, etc. But you could fire up GM on your Kurzweil K2000, your Quadrasynth, your Roland, or Yamaha professional level synthesizers and workstations and the same GM programs would sound amazing.

For less than a higher end Sound Canvas, you can get a real professional synth with a much bigger and better sound ROM, better DACs, better effects, etc.

brudgers• 2 years ago

Right.

General Midi specified a set of instruments and standard program values to select them. For example 0 (or one depending on where you start counting) is will be a piano. Just as pianos vary in timbre, so can the instruments among various GM devices.

jasomill• 2 years ago

Not just "could"; e.g., Yamaha's latest workstations, with gigabytes of samples, still support General MIDI[1].

[1] https://usa.yamaha.com/files/download/other_assets/7/2172427...

bzzzt4• 2 years ago

The problem you get replacing the instrument sounds with those from a better synth is they will sound different and often out of balance (certain instruments too quiet or loud or the timbre not fitting in). I believe there were a few projects trying to create a "sound font" to give optimal MIDI sound to early 90s DOS games.

an-unknown• 2 years ago

If you need some real world examples, here is a recording of "One Stop" from a few different professional synthesizers (Roland JV-1080, XV-5080, INTEGRA-7, and KORG X5DR) to get an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7wRCvWLm2o

aidenn0• 2 years ago

My sister's a musician and when I bought the adapter to hook her keyboard-synth to my Sound Blaster and fired up Wing Commander II, I was blown away by the sound track. It didn't hurt that the speakers on the keyboard were far better than the 5W speakers that I originally got with my Sound Blaster 2.0

Max-q• 2 years ago

I totally agree with you. I hated them from day one. Sounds to clean and polished.

jader2012• 2 years ago

I think things changed a bit with MIDI with the introduction of Soundfonts, and even more with dedicated MIDI sound cards.

I bought a Roland SCC-1 [1], and fell in love with MIDI. It was basically a CM-300 in a PCI card. I could program music that sounded like it was coming from a Roland keyboard. Such good memories.

But like you, I also was not a fan of FM produced MIDI, and that was only exacerbated by the SCC-1.

Soundfonts made it possible for games like FF7 to sound identical to the PS1, which was miles ahead of FM MIDI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_SC-55

emchammer• 2 years ago

FM synthesis on consumer MIDI sound cards only sounded dull because it had fewer operators than a professional synthesizer.

alisonatwork• 2 years ago

From my perspective it was exactly the opposite. FM synths were great because they sounded like synths. Some of the most memorable game soundtracks of the era were that precisely because they had such a characteristic sound to them. When high-quality sampled sounds became the norm, there was nothing unique about game music any more, it just sounded like any other soundtrack. Might as well just play a CD at that point.

The MT-32, from what I understand, was based on the D-50 series, which means in theory it should have had access to unique patches like DigitalNativeDance. The problem with General MIDI is that it limited patches to the lowest common denominator, so even if a ROMpler had the potential to make interesting sounds, composers would stick to the generic ones for compatibility. I think it's no surprise the Sound Blaster (with CD-ROM interface) won over General MIDI in the end, because that way composers could record on professional equipment and everyone would hear it the same. It's too bad that it also ushered in the era of "game music" just being orchestral scores, pop music etc.

yellowapple• 2 years ago

as much as you can't have a single type of cheese and expect it to be good in all meals

You clearly haven't tried Kerrygold's Dubliner cheese, then ;)

lproven• 2 years ago

That's what I thought!

Compared to how many people, in many countries, use cheese, this sounds like an audiophile complaint.

Sure, yes, for tens or hundreds of millions of people, cheese is just cheese and a medium cheddar type cheese is interchangeable with any other in any recipe.

Similarly massive world-famous tracks, and entire music genres, have been built upon the built-in preprogrammed rhythm tracks of a few cheap 1970s Japanese home keyboards. Whole types of music where nobody involved can read notation, or play a chord, or possibly play an instrument at all.

In the light of this, I found this comment elitist and snooty and patronising in the extreme, TBH.

Of course you can make good music around super limited basic sound samples. To deny this is to deny arguably a double-digit percentage of all popular music since the 1960s or '70s.

noizejoy• 2 years ago

Agreed, the MT32 sounded very bad, but it inspired a scene of MIDI enthusiasts and companies making countless MIDI song files for popular and classical music that travelled via floppy discs and bulletin board systems. And the MT32 was kind of GM before GM - and its drum note assignments can still be found in the bones of some of the most recent and ambitious beat making plugins.

So I value the MT32 as an historic technology culture enabler, rather than as a sonic treasure.

That being said, I should run mine through my guitar pedalboard and see if it can be made to sound cool. :-)

bambax• 2 years ago

I don't feel any nostalgia either but I do remember you could find specific soundfonts for specific sounds, and some of those sounded very good.

YawHawHawn• 2 years ago

Isn't General MIDI simply the mapping of certain instruments to certain numeric IDs? It doesn't dictate the actual sounds or samples that are used, does it?

Given that, why would it sound worse than any other means of triggering the same instruments?

nedrylandJP• 2 years ago

Even more useful once your MIDI files are organized.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puVYtkh-LO4

k12sosse• 2 years ago

SON, YOU KNOW THOSE MIDI FILES AREN'T SORTED!

Was glad to see this already here. Never before - or since - has the Tulley Toggle found a more appropriate use.

A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10

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