This is giving me some serious flashbacks to downloading midi files of pop songs from one of the local BBSes back in the early '90s.

I fully agree. It's a good rendition and does the original song justice but the voice is just too autotuned for my tastes. And the whole arrangement is too... pretty. There's no 'live' feeling to it. It's just his voice and a bunch of perfect instrumentals. Like he's singing to a midi track or something.

Edit: part of what bugs me about autotuning voices is that they're actually tuned to the wrong notes, ie. equal temperament instead of the just temperament a good singer sings naturally. There's the whole bit about voice ability but if they just tuned it to the right notes I'd be happy... or at least happier...

I think I had an adlib or midi soundcard back then because I don't remember it sounding so bad.

Still.... such a damn good game. Nostalgia hitting pretty bad right now.

This would have been one of several options. MI2 supported the usual PC speaker, adlib, and Midi.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Eye of the Tiger, Printer, Dot matrix, Old school, MIDI' to 'Eye of the Tiger, Printer, Dot matrix, Old school, MIDI, Rocky' - edited by Grimm

Not sure if this was done, but this guy needs to write a MIDI interface for these and then he can play a million songs on em.

5 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

The sound we hear hasn't got anything to do with the drums played in the video, other than faint thuds from hitting the pads - watch the drum fill at 0:29 - he plays a drum fill, but we still hear the regular drums from the original track.

As well - even if this was a "proper" rock band recording, you'd only trigger the pre-recorded sounds anyway, save for the odd drum fill.

For a Rock Band session to qualify as a livemusic, in my opinion, you'd have to overdub the drums with the sounds generated from a proper drumkit - electronic or acoustic.

And yes, I own and play rock band myself - I have an Alesis Dm10 kit hooked up with MIDI for proper drums, the Rock Band Keyboard for proper keyboard and the Fender Squier plastic fantastic "Strat" for MIDI guitar. It is especially fun with friends and beer.

Interesting. I find that I learn MUCH better with Rocksmith than I do from a straight tab. I hate the difficulty levels; I'd rather just show ALL of the notes ALL of the time (although that is easily fixed by just selecting the whole song and turning up the difficulty to 100%), but riff repeater plus slowing a song down to 60% or so (depending on how tough the bits are) has been my new ideal way of learning more difficult songs.

But for bass at least, I find that I'm able to sight-read the majority of songs to 97%+ accuracy. Probably 9 out of 10 new songs that I try, even if I've never looked at a tab before, I can get that kind of accuracy with the Rocksmith note highway / tab hybrid.

I do agree that sometimes it would be nice to be able to pause and just show a pure tab, to have more time to prepare and anticipate what things are coming. I know of two things to assist with that:

1) I know that there is a program that somebody put together that can read Rocksmith .psarc files and automatically create a tab text file from the song's arrangements. I can't recall the name of it, but I know it exists -- I've seen people talking about it at www.customsforge.com, the community for creating custom Rocksmith DLC tracks. I'll do some searching and see if I can find the exact name of that program for you.

2) As an alternative to Rocksmith if you prefer reading tabs but like playing along with the recording, check out "Go Playalong", which you can use to sync a guitar pro or powertab format tab with an .mp3 or other audio file and do Rocksmith-like features like slowing down, etc. but with the cursor scrolling through a traditional text-based tab. I sometimes use this also, but overall I prefer Rocksmith now. Works quite a bit like GuitarPro, but the cursor scrolling through the song is more intelligent about keeping bars ahead of your current position in view, and most importantly it lets you sync up to an actual recording rather than just playing back MIDI.

It's likely an Arduino board in the middle running code specifically written for this. I've seen similar projects. Some actually use custom MIDI files (1 "instrument" per drive), others have the songs coded by hand (C, python, etc).

I just posted another video that has a good explanation:
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Musical-Floppy-Drives-Computerphile

Just get a MIDI keyboard?

Aww, c'mon. You cannot expect me to pick a favorite! After 24 years of gaming on the PC, there's an endless list of themes in my head, one better than the other.

So here's what I came up with in two minutes:
-- Battle Isle 2, epic midi theme
-- The Settlers/Die Siedler, original theme
-- UFO: Enemy Unkown, theme
-- X-COM: Terror from the Deep, geoscape "crap your pants"-theme
-- Outlaws, theme
-- Carmageddon 2, "kill all the fucking pedestrians"-theme

Also add every single track of the Jagged Alliance soundtrack. The original, mind you, not the second installment. And do I even have to mention Hell March or the original C&C?

Edit: ffs, now I have to fire up DOSBox and play Battle Isle until my eyes start to bleed.

Fun? Sure, as long as he promises to keeps his evil midi-chlorians in check. Choking me with his thoughts would be a downer.

Oh, I'm still watching, and it's interesting, but man the MIDI music is horrendous.

Also the film critics are so full of shit, my god they sound like pretentious fools.

But all the special effects and tech guys are interesting.

[edit] Ok, now I just had that female critic start talking about Dave dismantling HAL as a rape... urgh, she must be a joy at parties