Fantastic—I’ve written a QuickDraw PICT converter, but I focused narrowly on just extracting pixel data. The format is basically a way to encode QuickDraw drawing commands, and getting the original image back (in the general case) means reimplementing QuickDraw.
The old Mac game Avara used this format for levels. It was funky… you could place blocks in a 3D world, and control elevation and height by changing the corner radius of rectangles. You needed a QuickDraw image editor to make levels, like ClarisDraw.
I listen to a fair amount of choral music, from plainchant and organum up through modern and contemporary works. I think the short answer is missing, which is that most choral music just isn’t that exciting.
The Wikipedia article for the Motet has an interesting quote which echoes the sentiment here:
> [the motet is] not to be celebrated in the presence of common people, because they do not notice its subtlety, nor are they delighted in hearing it, but in the presence of the educated and of those who are seeking out subtleties in the arts.
This quote is attributed to Johannes de Grocheio in the 1200s! That means that people have been saying that choral music is hard to appreciate for more than seven hundred years.
I don't really know what's meant by "exciting" here, but there's plenty of choral music that's upbeat, joyful and rhythmical. For me the most enjoyable form of musical "excitement" is frisson, which choral music has in great abundance. Nothing can give you goosebumps like a good choir.
I disagree with the premise. I don't think there's anything inherently "harder to appreciate" about choral music. It's just a personal, and no doubt culturally influenced, preference. I struggle to enjoy opera and hip-hop, but that's on me. I don't go around writing articles about how hard they are to appreciate.
I totally agree - I've sung in a few choirs myself but even I myself hesitate to attend choral events sometimes. It takes effort to appreciate the depth involved, even with modern choral music (think Eric Whitacre) or even gospel choir, compared to other forms of entertainment.
I also agree with the article that understanding the blend of voices is best "when you are singing in the midst of the action" rather than on a recording. But also, that means it's hard to gain familiarity with specific songs or genre-specific styles, which is another barrier to entry.
I think there’s a big issue with the recording style used for choral music. It tends to be recorded with a far mic in an echoey room which gives the experience of hearing it in church, but I think close micing the individual sections would give more of a sense of being in the choir and really help make everything more distinct. I don’t know any choral music recorded this way, but I know that one of Tony Banks’ (keyboard player for Genesis) orchestral suites was recorded this way which I think worked well.
A recent recording of Obrecht masses had close mic, recorded in a studio usually used for pop music with very little echo, with one voice per part [1]. The effect really is quite startling. The last time choral music was recorded like this was (coincidentally another Obrecht mass) more than 30 years ago [2].
I think a lot of vocal music written around 1500 would benefit from this approach. It has been remarked that this is really a sort of sacred chamber music rather than music requiring a huge choir. The music moves too fast and it's very difficult for a big choir in a very resonant space to do Obrecht, Josquin and friends full justice.
I completely agree that one-per-part singing really brings out the beauty in 16th century choral music. I sing in a choir that specializes in music of this period, and while our live performances usually use two singers per part to fill a room, our recordings are more often one-per-part with relatively close micing.
We do record in churches because we like the reverb, so it's not quite the dry studio sound you're describing, but we do prioritize a clear sound stage where all of the parts can be clearly heard.
We've found that a Blumlein mic configuration (two figure-8 pattern microphones placed at a 90 degree angle from each other) helps to create this clarity of texture, where all the parts can be heard individually across the stereo image, especially when listening with headphones. I can't take credit for this idea though: we learned it from the sound engineer who records the Tallis Scholars, who told us that they record in this configuration.
Here are a couple examples of tracks recorded using this style:
That Byrd is very nice! The individual voices came across very well on
my IEMs.
I'm used to reverb as well, and the complete lack of reverb in these
recordings still sound a little weird to me, as if they are singing in
a closet. But even in the 15th and 16th century vocal polyphony was
likely performed (often?) in places other than the resonant nave or
choir of a large church. I read that aristocratic (or ecclesial)
patrons would have singers perform in private chambers, and
performance of votive masses at a private chapel to the side of main
space in the church would have very different (and quite dry)
acoustics.
Ha, I don't know much about Dolby Atmos and spacial placement. But from prior experience I'm somewhat skeptical about what this kind of clever DSP can do for choral music.
For example, when I learned about convolution reverb, and how it should theoretically be able to simulate the unique reverb pattern of any room, I was initially excited about the possibilities. But after trying it I was underwhelmed.
That said, I'm open to being convinced. If you know of any compelling demos of this kind of spatial placement, I'd be interested to see.
I had not heard of Nonsuch Palace, despite having a passing interest in Henry VIII and certainly a large interest in Tallis! Is it thought that Spem was performed there?
Atmos on earphones is done by manipulating the waveform that reaches the eardrum to reproduce the distinctive impulse response due to the sound bouncing off different parts of the ear as it arrives. (Come to think of it I guess that's really also a form of convolutional reverb.) I think it's cool that it can be done on earphones at all, and with head tracking the effect can be noticeable at least, but I don't think it really adds much. I find earphone listening sort of envelopingly directionless in a special way of its own that I enjoy anyway.
On a multi-speaker separates system, though, I think it's done simply by attenuating the signal to each speaker. Whether it's just that or something more sophisticated, the effect is much stronger and adds a lot more to the experience. A good system can place sounds clearly anywhere within a full dome enclosing the listener. The problem is that very few people have such a system, so the audience isn't huge. (That said, Apple Music heavily promotes spatial audio, so an Atmos Spem in Alium might reach more people just from search placement...)
What Atmos adds beyond surround sound (which itself offers untapped opportunities for Spem in Alium) is:
* It carries independent position data for up to 100 tracks, which can be edited (so you could experiment with the placement).
* It adapts to the set of speakers available at playback, rather than having a fixed track per speaker.
* It works on earphones, to some extent at least.
* It has vertical as well as planar positioning, so the "balconies" would work.
I don't know of any renaissance choral music available in Atmos. Most of Deutsche Gramaphon's new recordings use it, so there might be some good classical examples there. A listening room should have general demos that would show the effect off.
I think the Nonsuch Palace thing is just a suggestion rather than anything strongly historical. Wikipedia mentions it [1]:
> This account is consistent with the catalogue entry at Nonsuch Palace: Arundel House was the London home of Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel; Nonsuch Palace was his country residence. Nonsuch had an octagonal banqueting hall, which in turn had four first-floor balconies above the ground floor; on this supposition it could have been the case that Tallis designed the music to be sung not only in the round, but with four of the eight five-part choirs singing from the balconies.
I want a recording of Spem in Alium done with a mic per singer, placed spatially using Dolby Atmos and arranged as they might have been in the octagonal banqueting hall of Nonsuch Palace: surrounding the audience (in the round) and with four of the eight choirs up on balconies.
(Say what you want about "spatial audio" on earphones - if you're lucky enough to have a good home cinema separates system it's awesome, and this would be the ultimate application for it IMO.)
i think is also matter where you listen it. i think its very dull, but in a good church or room with a choir who is used to that specific place suddenly its like magic.
Company I worked at back then used XMPP. There was something that you could paste into the chat that would make all of the Mac clients crash, and to fix it, someone with a different client would have to join the chat and type a lot of comments to flood the history.
I am not surprised to hear the protocol is an abomination.
Yeah, there was a similar bug in HexChat and other (pango?) stuff some years back. I remember even though I was using irssi, it could crash my Termite window.
Taking this moment to promote 1-bit art! I run a couple accounts which promote 1-bit art and I’m trying to figure out how to expand what artwork is included. These are just personal accounts that retweet art from 1-bit artists on BlueSky and Twitter.
The one complaint about sound design is how the background music works. I think it starts playing when you’re not active, but on any given playthrough, it never gets a chance to trigger.
There are separate soundtracks for each faction, I think.
Interesting, I have a Roland S-330 from the late 1980s and my main concern getting it was the floppy drive viability. It didn’t occur to me that the mouse would be difficult.
You probably already know this stuff or have decided against it for authenticity or whatever, but just in case, you can use some of the Gotek USB flash drive floppy disk emulators:
I just started using GitHub Actions for a personal project, and as you do, I trawled HN for opinions on how to use it.
At first I built a workflow out of steps published on GitHub. Use ilammy/mms-dev-cmd, lukka/get-cmake, lukka/run-vcpkg, all to build a project with CMake for Windows targets. Of course I referred to actions by SHA like you should
But one comment stuck with me. Something like, “You should just run your own code on GitHub Actions, rather than piecing it together from publicly available actions.” That made a lot of sense. I ended up writing a driver program for my personal project’s CI builds. One job builds the driver program, and then the next job runs the driver program to do the entire build.
I wouldn’t do this if I were getting paid for it… it’s more time-consuming. But it means that I am only minimally tied to GitHub actions. I can run the build driver from my own computer easily enough.
> I ended up writing a driver program for my personal project’s CI builds. One job builds the driver program, and then the next job runs the driver program to do the entire build.
Yes things like that have been discussed before on HN. Also for example use a justfile (or something similar) and then call that from inside the Action to reduce vendor lock-in.
I use Actions merely as a way to trigger a custom Webhook. Then I do everything on the server that receives the hook with my own code. I hate YAML that much.
That's effectively what we are doing. The webhook receives any "custom properties" you have defined on your repo, the ssh url, and critically, the name of the Action that was run. The receiving server can use all of this to select the appropriate pipeline. Our build server is not containerized.
Sounds like you are assuming that I have a server always running for this stuff? That assumption is wrong. I don’t want to run CI servers. If I had servers always running, I would install Jenkins on them and the problem would be solved.
If you are doing deployments, actions etc does exactly that. Run pure bash commands or whatever.
If you want it for other purposes, you essentially want to run a "server" application but don't want to manage a server. Just use serverless? Write a JS function (or some other languages) and the platform will run it when the event triggers.
We do, but you can only trigger those on predefined events, and we want our release manager to be independent of any push or pull mechanisms on the repo. You can also run actions from the github web ui which makes them available even to non technical managers.
Our Action has a single step, it has an "if: false" declaration so it never runs, and no runners are engaged. This immediately completes and fires off a "workflow_job" webhook which triggers the build server to act.
Paul Gold, owner of Salt Mastering in Brooklyn, NY, describes the custom A/B path console he designed and built to master audio from open reel tape to lacquer master in order to create vinyl records without using a computer.
I don’t think you could fairly say Windows 95 is an exokernel to DOS. Windows 95 is a whole OS, which happened to go through DOS during the boot process, and keep bits of DOS around for certain pieces of functionality (device drivers?)
Maybe Quake II on DOS will run with less system memory than the Windows version.
Windows 95, like Windows 3.x enhanced mode and Windows/386 before that, is actually a hypervisor that runs DOS in VMs; and one of those VMs, the "system VM", runs a DOS extender that handles the Win32 and GUI part.
Notably, the DOS environment under Windows is running in a hardware mode called "virtual 8086 mode" which allows it to be isolated from the other DOS environments and, even more importantly, from full BIOS access. These limitations kept the whole system safer and more stable than DOS in "real mode" but made some DOS programs unusable under Windows.
Windows 95 had a horrible reputation for games in the early days, for good reasons or not (maybe mostly because how bad Windows 3.x was for games?). Quake was possibly the first mainstream game that managed to convince many that it was possible to get good games performance without sticking to MS-DOS? 1997 was still a great year for DOS games really. Even 1998 was not bad. For someone playing games on a PC in that era there was really no hurry to switch to Windows 95/98 (but by 1997 I had moved on to Linux instead anyway).
Windows 95 is so good at pretending to not be there that it convinced a generation of nerds that it was a thin layer on top of DOS, but the reality is the other way round.
The old Mac game Avara used this format for levels. It was funky… you could place blocks in a 3D world, and control elevation and height by changing the corner radius of rectangles. You needed a QuickDraw image editor to make levels, like ClarisDraw.
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