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Hello everyone. We have a special treat for you: a new blogpost that is a audiovisual whirlwind tour through a neglected era of music technology. It's easily the longest, but also the best-researched and most fun thing we've ever written: https://hikari.noyu.me/blog/2025-08-24-around-the-general-midi-world-in-12-pianos.html
@hikari "The Fat Man on Game Audio" has an interesting story about General MIDI. A later revision of the standard eventually _did_ come to specify the dynamics of the different instruments, because once George Sanger got his hands on a second General MIDI card and tried The 7th Guest on it, he discovered it was completely unlistenable. The standard became "do whatever Sound Canvas does", and "Fat Labs" was founded to put his personal seal of approval on new cards. https://discuss.fringe.games/topic/15/episode-6-shawn-hargreaves-discussion-thread
@SpindleyQ ooooooh this sounds very interesting, we will have to check it out at some point. one related thing we're aware of is there's a mid-90's document on midi.org somewhere that basically discusses endless errata and implementation problems with general midi