5 ms·

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?

by sotix 1y ago

badc0ffee 1y ago
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?
- brudgers 1y ago
  There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file In the case of canyon.mid there is because it was composed for a specific midi instrument with a particular set of timbres. Or to put it another way, it’s music and therefore complicated.
  - timewizard 1y ago
    I can play the guitar parts on a banjo but it ain't going to sound right.
    - brudgers 1y ago
      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.
      - timewizard 1y ago
        I didn't say it wouldn't sound good. It wouldn't sound right, as in, not what was intended. In particular, think of how this would play out if you had never heard that song before, would that be what you were after?
        brudgers 1y ago
        I was barely thinking about what you said at all. I was thinking about retelling the story I wanted to retell. Thinking about writing. The banjo was just an excuse. I didn’t hear it.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 1y ago
    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.
  - Bluecobra 1y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/0j4uywdNq44
- pacifika 1y ago
  MIDI files like this depend of the General MIDI standardized specification for electronic musical instruments.
- POSSIBLE_FACT 1y ago
  "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.
  - cardiffspaceman 1y ago
    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.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  And, of course, because it could play square waves, you could bitbang it to play digitized audio using PWM. Sounded terrible, and super CPU-heavy (so not useful in games), but still.
  - boudin 1y ago
    Pinball Fantasies was actually quite impressive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb8mLBa3dcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb8mLBa3dcg
    - Sharlin 1y ago
      Huh, impressive indeed!
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    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.
    - boudin 1y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXB8AddxBgM
    - bananaboy 1y ago
      Yes! World class leaderboard golf with RealSound!
- stevage 1y ago
  I find it very painful that modern computers still have such terrible midi chips, and modern operating systems don't come with decent midi synthesisers. It's a real hassle trying to get reasonable sounding MIDI on either windows or macOS.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 1y ago
    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.
    - xp84 1y ago
      Thanks for the inspiration to dig this up for comparison: https://youtu.be/fWnTYkCSZfA https://youtu.be/fWnTYkCSZfA 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.
    - bananaboy 1y ago
      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 https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth). It seems like it supports Windows 11.
- boomlinde 1y ago
  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.
brudgers 1y ago
Speakers (and rooms) have their own unique acoustical properties (e.g. distortion, frequency response, etc.). Also it matters where your ears are. Finally, “high fidelity” is not a synonym for “musical.”
vunderba 1y ago
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.
Sharlin 1y ago
MIDI in consumer use mostly went away once digitized sound became cheap enough. Though it's still very much there if you're composing or engraving music, for example with a program like MuseScore.
whywhywhywhy 1y ago
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.
- khedoros1 1y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ (Secret of Monkey Island theme, PC Speaker) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB-HAZsRs 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 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)
  - whywhywhywhy 1y ago
    All sounds wrong to me because I grew up with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpmpBLANYwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpmpBLANYwM

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?

by sotix 1y 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?

badc0ffee 1y ago

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?

brudgers 1y ago
There is no "correct" sound for a MIDI file In the case of canyon.mid there is because it was composed for a specific midi instrument with a particular set of timbres. Or to put it another way, it’s music and therefore complicated.
- timewizard 1y ago
  I can play the guitar parts on a banjo but it ain't going to sound right.
  - brudgers 1y ago
    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.
    - timewizard 1y ago
      I didn't say it wouldn't sound good. It wouldn't sound right, as in, not what was intended. In particular, think of how this would play out if you had never heard that song before, would that be what you were after?
      - brudgers 1y ago
        I was barely thinking about what you said at all. I was thinking about retelling the story I wanted to retell. Thinking about writing. The banjo was just an excuse. I didn’t hear it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 1y ago
  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.
- Bluecobra 1y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/0j4uywdNq44
pacifika 1y ago
MIDI files like this depend of the General MIDI standardized specification for electronic musical instruments.
POSSIBLE_FACT 1y ago
"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.
- cardiffspaceman 1y ago
  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.
Sharlin 1y ago
And, of course, because it could play square waves, you could bitbang it to play digitized audio using PWM. Sounded terrible, and super CPU-heavy (so not useful in games), but still.
- boudin 1y ago
  Pinball Fantasies was actually quite impressive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb8mLBa3dcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb8mLBa3dcg
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    Huh, impressive indeed!
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  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.
  - boudin 1y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXB8AddxBgM
  - bananaboy 1y ago
    Yes! World class leaderboard golf with RealSound!
stevage 1y ago
I find it very painful that modern computers still have such terrible midi chips, and modern operating systems don't come with decent midi synthesisers. It's a real hassle trying to get reasonable sounding MIDI on either windows or macOS.
- TazeTSchnitzel 1y ago
  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.
  - xp84 1y ago
    Thanks for the inspiration to dig this up for comparison: https://youtu.be/fWnTYkCSZfA https://youtu.be/fWnTYkCSZfA 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.
  - bananaboy 1y ago
    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 https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth). It seems like it supports Windows 11.
boomlinde 1y ago
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.

brudgers 1y ago

Speakers (and rooms) have their own unique acoustical properties (e.g. distortion, frequency response, etc.). Also it matters where your ears are. Finally, “high fidelity” is not a synonym for “musical.”

vunderba 1y ago

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.

Sharlin 1y ago

MIDI in consumer use mostly went away once digitized sound became cheap enough. Though it's still very much there if you're composing or engraving music, for example with a program like MuseScore.

whywhywhywhy 1y ago

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.

khedoros1 1y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ (Secret of Monkey Island theme, PC Speaker) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qpB-HAZsRs 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 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)
- whywhywhywhy 1y ago
  All sounds wrong to me because I grew up with this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpmpBLANYwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpmpBLANYwM