Oh dang. I uploaded a version of Mario Kart 64’s Rainbow Road — the one that’s listed as “(Extended Version) (v2.0)”. [1]
This was probably from 1996/97. Not only do they still have it, but the site hasn’t changed at all since then! What a kick of nostalgia!
Edit: actually I checked the comments which shows the upload time, and either I’m remembering about 6 years off, or the timestamp was updated somehow (if it was transferred from another location).
Mario Kart 64 was released between Dec '96 and June '97 (depending on region) so either you were very quick to create the MIDI version or the dates you remember are off.
I actually checked and found the original .mid file on my NAS. Looks like the file itself was from 11/1997, so I'm guessing I uploaded it a few years later, or for some reason the upload data was changed.
Oh my, this really sends me down memory lane. It must have been around 1996 when I spent a substantial amount of time downloading and listening to VGMusic. Back then I was on dial up and would continue to be for another five years or so. Thus, MP3s were expensive to get and it would take a good portion of an hour to download a single one anyway. With Midi I could get entire tracks in a few seconds, plug them into Winamp, and be on my merry way.
I had a similar experience with tool-assisted speedruns! Videos were huge and had terrible quality, but I could just download a small "movie" file for an emulator and watch the game play itself with superhuman skills.
I contributed a few midis to that site back in the day. Chrono Cross band arrangement of Scar of Time, a FFX battle theme, a Secret of Mana “into the thick of it”, and an organ piece from one the Ys games.
This site is one of the pillars grounding me to the reality that once was the internet.
A lot of Console music is distributed as the machine code that is fed to the synthesizer chip. Emulators have been built to faithfully reproduce that sound from the same code.
You'd have to build an emulator for the Cisco phone and extract the code that generates that sound. I'd wager it's just a routine in ARM that is creating the sound on the main CPU...
It mostly works — except I've noticed that html-midi-player will continue to play the last note if there's any kind of delay set, which is jarring. html-midi-player doesn't seem to expose a JavaScript API to make any of it simple...
I just started using Linux on my new Framework laptop, and I'm really enjoying the experience so far since it doesn't feel too different from MacOS for me. However, there doesn't seem to be a de-facto MIDI player for the desktop when I did a search for it.
What should I install for Ubuntu to listen to the files?
The last amazing player I've used when I was a kid was WinGroove for Windows 3.11. Had an amazing software-based synth and I have never found anything close to it since.
For Windows, I find "Soundfont Midi Player" https://falcosoft.hu/softwares.html#midiplayer to be the best choice. It uses a Bassmidi based player with a provided soundfont, and MIDI files sound great on it.
It even loads tracker music, converting it to MIDI and Soundfont files. It also supports MIDI files which use unconventional instruments, as long as there is a soundfont file in the directory to pick. Useful for GBA music rips.
I have not tested it on Wine.
---
Alternatively, download the SF2 file from that page, and configure VLC Media Player to use that SF2 file. The setting may be hidden unless you enter advanced mode for configuration.
You might want to check out FluidSynth if you don't mind a command line
application. I don't think it has a graphical interface but it can run in the
background, so you might be able to use it with other applications which do.
I spent a LOT of time here in the 1990s. I used to have VERY spotty dial-up, and I would download my favorite music both before MP3s were really a thing, and also when downloading MP3s just wasn't feasible on my very poor internet connection. This is one of the major sites responsible for my love of music. All I had available to me otherwise was the the MTV countdown, and whatever garbage my friends were listening to.
Readit News
This was probably from 1996/97. Not only do they still have it, but the site hasn’t changed at all since then! What a kick of nostalgia!
Edit: actually I checked the comments which shows the upload time, and either I’m remembering about 6 years off, or the timestamp was updated somehow (if it was transferred from another location).
[1] http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/n64/
This site is one of the pillars grounding me to the reality that once was the internet.
It turns out that the ringtone is procedurly generated by the phone in realtime, and no such a file exists.
It sad to learn that not everything we make can be stored for high fidelity reproducibility later on.
You'd have to build an emulator for the Cisco phone and extract the code that generates that sound. I'd wager it's just a routine in ARM that is creating the sound on the main CPU...
It mostly works — except I've noticed that html-midi-player will continue to play the last note if there's any kind of delay set, which is jarring. html-midi-player doesn't seem to expose a JavaScript API to make any of it simple...
What should I install for Ubuntu to listen to the files?
The last amazing player I've used when I was a kid was WinGroove for Windows 3.11. Had an amazing software-based synth and I have never found anything close to it since.
Edit: Wingroove also works on Wine!
It even loads tracker music, converting it to MIDI and Soundfont files. It also supports MIDI files which use unconventional instruments, as long as there is a soundfont file in the directory to pick. Useful for GBA music rips.
I have not tested it on Wine.
---
Alternatively, download the SF2 file from that page, and configure VLC Media Player to use that SF2 file. The setting may be hidden unless you enter advanced mode for configuration.
There's also apparently a Wingroove SF that people have made too. This is awesome.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MIDI#GStreamer-based_player...
I'm using Fedora rn, so I adjusted the packages names and did something similar to the arch wiki, so I'm not sure the closest ones for Ubuntu.
I find VLC ugly, but if you can live with it, just install the vlc plugin like a sibling post here said.
Fluidsynth is amazing and I'm using it to emulate a decent enough synth for dosbox games.
But crude. I do not know media player style frontends.