Oh dang. I uploaded a version of Mario Kart 64’s Rainbow Road — the one that’s listed as “(Extended Version) (v2.0)”. [1]<p>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!<p>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).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/n64/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/n64/</a>
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 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.<p>This site is one of the pillars grounding me to the reality that once was the internet.
It's been months since I started looking for the file for the Chirp1 ringtone in Cisco phones, to no avail.<p>It turns out that the ringtone is procedurly generated by the phone in realtime, and no such a file exists.<p>It sad to learn that not everything we make can be stored for high fidelity reproducibility later on.
They should embed a MIDI player like this: <a href="https://cifkao.github.io/html-midi-player/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cifkao.github.io/html-midi-player/</a>
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.<p>What should I install for Ubuntu to listen to the files?<p>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.<p>Edit: Wingroove also works on Wine!
Those enjoying this might also like <a href="https://c64audio.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://c64audio.com/</a> . If only I could find the archives of the KDVS chiptunes show from the mid-90's....
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.
<a href="https://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/gamecube/mirorb.mid" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.vgmusic.com/music/console/nintendo/gamecube/miro...</a><p>It's not the best, but this is how I listened to it before they got uploaded to youtube. And no, the Miror B theme in XD is <i>not</i> better than the OG Colosseum version!!
vgmusic.com was my bread and butter 20 years ago. I had such a big midi collection. That was until I discovered nsf and spc files that reproduced the sound accurately, then later on mp3s and still later video game music on Spotify.
For those interested in this sort of thing, you can download chiptunes from ocremix.org that can run in a musical emulator like ChipAmp.<p>Unfortunately I know of no such emulators for Mac or Linux.
Oh my God. I used to grab MIDI’s from here in my mid to late 90s game development days. This opened up a chamber in my brain that had been closed for 20+ years.