> The PianoDisc versions are mp3s encoded with the right channel carrying MIDI to be played on the piano, and the left channel containing any accompanying music to be played through attached speakers (who doesn't want the harmonica on Piano Man?)
What a cursed format!
I don't understand what the designers were thinking of... 2000 Hz square wave on right channel? Seriously? Nobody would hear something suspicious and nobody would literally see it on spectrum analyzer. Maybe it's holdover from analog days and it was on casette tape before.
It's rare that a simple format description can give so many hints about the evolution (or lack thereof) of this system:
- The MP3 file encoding a stereo signal with one being audio-rate encoded digital data makes this just the latest layer of a barely updated system.
- The two channel format inside the MP3 must itself be evolved from another audio storage medium that didn't have a way to interleave digital data and audio. Furthermore, it must have been limited to only two channels, so they had to sacrifice one channel for the MIDI data.
- An audio CD would fit the specifications, but then, a mixed audio/digital CD with a player that buffers the MIDI from the data partition and plays the audio in real time wouldn't have been hard to create. Only the memory for the MIDI data could have been a potential cost issue in the mid-80s.
- Encoding the digital data on a carrier wave, cassette tape style, is really odd as MIDI was released in 1982 and mixed audio/data CDs were standardized in 1983. PianoDisc as a company was founded in 1988, so all-digital decoding tech would have been reasonably easy to build.
The really mind-boggling part of all of this to me is that it would be extremely easy to create a modern, higher quality recording format (e.g. proprietary container with MIDI and compressed audio) and the decoding hardware would still be dirt cheap.
My guess - these are not not on PyPI because of libraries. AI generating is good when you don't care about how your app works, when implementation details does not matter.
When you are developing library it's exact opposite - you really care about how it works and which interface it provides so you end up writing it mostly by hand.
This is an interesting point when the question is "how do I build a Windows app?" and a decision needs to be made. React is definitely one of the options that some consider when this question arises.
I think you miss the more common reasoning though. This starts with "can we build a Windows app?" The answer to that was "no" for many more people until relatively recently. The .NET Framework wasn't as available by default until the second half of the 2000s which caused some Windows app devs to hold off beyond the performance reasons and WinForms vs WPF. Electron and React go hand-in-hand here as they made a (crappy) Windows app easy.
What I feel popularized this was the webview approach on mobile. In 2010, there were a ton of frameworks popping up for hybrid mobile development. This was carried forward to desktop although some of us had been embedding IE webviews much earlier. This let people say "yes" and it went from one thing to the next with diversions into React Native.
Very many vector graphics standards use the idea of a current position. A distinguishing feature of turtle graphics is to have a current direction as well.
It's a shame SVG doesn't. Many shapes can be specified much more concisely.
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> There’s an old electronics joke that if you want to build an oscillator, you should try building an amplifier
This can be easily demonstrated using so called no-input technique[0] which basically means that you patch audio mixer output to it's input and it starts feedbacking and you can create some tones from this. Note that this needs to be done carefully.
That was a delicious sonic experience. Reminds me of "circuit bending", an aesthetic technique to push the limits of hardware in unintended ways to get creative effects. Otherworldly sounds emerging from glitches, feedbacks, overdrives.
What's fascinating is the endless variety of chaos and patterns created from such a simple mechanism and system. It seems the feedback is key, how an output is fed back into another input. Recursive functions, like fractal geometry.
What a cursed format!
I don't understand what the designers were thinking of... 2000 Hz square wave on right channel? Seriously? Nobody would hear something suspicious and nobody would literally see it on spectrum analyzer. Maybe it's holdover from analog days and it was on casette tape before.
Also somebody reverse engineered it before - https://www.kinura.net/mid2pianocd/
So Fable probably just igested it from documentation of this software or some very obscure forum thread somewhere.
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