social.noyu.me

imagine if Windows shipped with a high-quality GM2 synth instead. or a high-quality GS synth, for that matter… but those standards are both obsolete in this century, and at this point, I don't think Microsoft care.

a little bird told me that they were considering removing Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth as part of their MIDI 2.0 push. i'm glad they didn't do that. but imagine what could be if they added a better synth alongside it. oh well.

microsoft i am begging you to phone up roland or yamaha and drop some amount that would be peanuts to you on a license for one of their old vsts

the worst thing is that Microsoft themselves have made a somewhat better synth: DirectMusic (part of DirectX). i don't know why they made the default Windows synth suck and only use the better one in games. maybe it was too much for an average 1996 office PC.

uuuuu i really have to write that blog post or make that youtube video don't i. there's just… so much misunderstanding about this topic because most people haven't been cramming their head full of knowledge about obsolete standards for the last year and a half of their life

@hikari I strongly suspect that the reasoning was related to Microsoft at the time being a number of smaller organisational units that were even more hostile to each other than they were to competitors outside the company.

@hikari I feel like Microsoft might actually have an incentive to do bug compatibility now? Like what if they upgrade their general midi and then people want to go back and listen to In the Hall of the Mountain King.RMI and it DOESN'T SOUND LIKE THEY REMEMBER

@mcc yes i'm glad they didn't drop MSGS because it'd be bad for compatibility. but a better synth alongside it as an option, perhaps triggered by a sysex (MSGS never supported General MIDI 2, so a GM2 Reset would be an obvious way to activate a better synth) would be nice

@mcc of course i'm sure a bunch of people out there wrote MIDI files with GM2 software and only tested on MSGS, so… maybe even that is a bad idea

@hikari Maybe this will just inexplicably show up one day in PowerToys

@hikari @mcc ah. material safety gear solid

@rcombs @mcc monosodium GS

@hikari I think the thing *most* non-musicians actually associate MIDI with is "those old ringtones for phones", referring to the polyphonic tones that were omni-present in the early 2000s, if they even know what MIDI or .mid is at all?

As considerably less non-musical non-technical non-gamer (in a very specific era of games) have ever heard sounds made with the default windows synth compared to the default ringtones that still saw a lot of use even as mp3 support proliferated

If you want to be all technical and mean something that supports hardware MIDI input devices, not just the file format + synth output then sure, the default windows synth is probably the 1st association sound-wise for non-musicians...

...but even then I think the majority of non-musicians who have an association of what "MIDI" even is, will largely be at least somewhat technical people, and they're more likely to have heard something besides the MS GS Wavetable Synth at least?

Like I know when I was a kid, I had some game that used MIDI for music but also bundled either a small soundfont or some freepats style GUS patches for consistent sound, or encountered doom ports that used freepats and/or timidity by default, and saw guides for getting better audio out of certain games with freeware synths and so moved over to using specialised players for midi even on Windows fairly early on

So yeah, it's probably the default association (besides phones) but I think the group of people that are old enough and technical enough to hear "MIDI" and think of that synth sound (not that they even know what the MS GS WS is, just the sound it makes) but not so technical or musically inclined to have have other associations (or even just MIDI keyboards in music class or something) isn't exactly a large number of people.

It is still undeniably a tragedy they've only heard that legacy GS synth and nothing newer/better though!

And I think a blog post / video / whatever on the topic would be cool!