King’s Quest VI was one of my first “obsession” games. I first played it at Matt’s house who had x386 with enough memory to run it. I can’t remember what sound card he had (either a SoundBlaster 16 or Pro Audio Spectrum), but it was something with emulated Roland MT-32 MIDI and even then, the music of this game was absolutely awesome. Decades past… Quest Studios released both MIDI and digital versions of the music from many of the popular Sierra games....
Back in the day (before such modern things as compressed digital audio and mp3s), MIDI was king. For me, it was initially driven by the soundtracks of Sierra’s adventure games like Kings Quest 6 and Quest for Glory 3 and 4. It expanded into hobbyist music editors (think early, early versions of Cakewalk), and eventually I purchased a Roland JV-35 keyboard for the sole reason of improving the sound of my MIDI files (and this was before SB AWE Soundfont technology)....
So what caused me to be up till 2 in the morning? Struggling with video encoding, conversion and HTML5 fickleness. Essentially, this is not a process for mere mortals. While video in general is complicated enough, most will and should rely on a site like youtube to share their videos (at least basic creators). However due to certain, ummm… how shall we say, “ambitious” music labels, music video remixes get flagged and punted immediately....
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So over the weekend I refreshed my desktop with both Windows 7 and the latest Kubuntu release. While I have been religiously upgrading the linux side of my dual boot system every 6 months with the [k]ubuntu release schedule, I was still running Windows XP which hadn’t been reinstalled in about 3 years (it was quite sluggish and desperately needed a spring cleaning). While I didn’t do a live blogging of the process, I thought I’d recap some highlights....
Below are the three songs included in my old Roland JV-35. While the standard GM complement of samples sounds a bit dated, I always thought these songs were well done and did a good job of showing off the keyboard. Unfortunately the expansion board didn’t include more ROMs… the wide range of sounds on the board are really good. On the whole the old keyboard has served me quite well, though the MIDI-in port is malfunctioning at this point....
Update: 2010-04-20 – Fixed some timing and EQ issues. Also programed some new drums. Still working on solo. Below is a rough cut of my rendition of devilishlypure’s song Nerdfighterlike which was then done by Hank & Katherine Green here (of the vlogbrothers). It is fairly rough at the moment and missing the middle solo, as well as vocals (though in the process of exploring my home studio, I’ve determined my singing range is rather narrow)....
Squeee! Serenity Malcolm Reynolds Browncoat Replica. Awesome! Unfortunately the price is quite steep ($320), but just think of how many Halloweens this would cover where you didn’t have to stress out about what the hell you’ll wear to that party! Here’s what you need to complete the costume: Worth it?
Necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s especially true for software. For a long time, I’ve wanted to display my lifestream as a single page (and on my own domain) in a way I could customize to match my own aesthetics. I tried Sweetcron, Kakuteru, and a few custom scripts for pulling data from Friendfeed. Everything was either too complex or lacked the ability to customize the way I wanted....
I love youtube. This was an excellent series of lectures that I would have loved to take in college, but I have no interest in writing the associated papers. Just to listen and think on what’s presented. Carve out an hour a day to make your way through this. You won’t regret it.