Music

Music

Music on the web is rather strange and confused at this time. That's really true of computers in general of course. There is no unified standard or standards. Unix was the normal OS at the start of the web as it ran on many different hardware vendor's machines. C and C++ were running on and making the code for those systems and ANSI made standards for them to make them more transportable. All that is fine, but how do we output music? Most early systems just put a pair of DACs (Digital to Analog Convertors) on IO ports and just sent a 'stream' of data to the port at either top speed or a controlled speed. When I was at U.N.H. this what how we did it, with a combination of assembly and C code routines to make the music. That was in 1979, in the 1980's a standard called MIDI came out. This standard is still changing and being worked on, but it includes standard formats and hardware interfaces for music. Windows (all versions) uses it's own version of this standard for it's .MID files (really a modified version of the IFF .SMUS standard from EA [Electronic Arts]). The first MIDI device to be popular on PCs was the MPU401, a MIDI pair of IO ports (IN & OUT) for the MIDI hardware standard. That is why you see keyboard makers in the MIDI MAP and sound devices areas of windows machines. After that the ADLIB card came out, some with MPU401 clone ports on them. Next came SB ( SoundBlaster) cards, SBPro, SB16, AWE32 and a host of others. PC sound cards of today are versions of these cards or can be made to act like these cards with software. The common addresses used by these cards are:
Base address of 220H (0x220 IRQ 5 DMA 1 & 5)
MIDI port at 330H (0x330 IRQ 9)
OPL3 port at 388H (0x388)
WTBL port at 620H (0x620) Truely there are other addresses (0x230 for CDROM on old SBPro/SB16) that are important to know, but they aren't really required to make music. Generally under Windows these addresses are setup by software that came with the card or that Windows auto-detected. Under Unix (in my case generally Linux), Linux is much the same now. We made custom kernels in the past, but now use modules to handle that. There are now RealAudio 2.0 & 3.0 'plugins' for Netscape/Firefox running under most versions of Unix including Linux. Of course this means there is also Netscape/Firefox available for these machines from Netscape or Firefox. There is also sampled audio in AAC (.m4a AKA MP4), MP3, and Wave formats that are very common now as storage is so common and cheap.
For editiing I have started to use Noteworthy Composer here's the first calssical quartet I did with it called ATune. I did
rush the end instead of developing all the themes alone and in combination (as the piece should) as it was 11pm and I
was getting tried after 2 hours of inputting the piece. Here's a much older piece I did orginally on the Amiga and have now
re-coded for the PC: One Halloween Morn (done one Halloween morning as if you couldn't guess).
Yola seems to add a subdirectory when you upload files call 'resources', so when I created my audio subdirectory it became resources/audio which I figured out by adding an atune.mid widget. They just like their quirks I guess.

Music Sites

The Doors

Mike Oldfield

Pink Floyd

MISC.

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    Hmmm, Can't seem to get these .mid's to play!
    If you hear one that's hergest1 (Mike Oldfield's Hergest Ridge Part 1).

     
    Folk Tunes (web)
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