About

Hardware

Tone Generators

Yamaha SW1000XG - Excellent for XG file playback. PCI soundcard equivalent to a MU128. Very good effects, but waveforms are somewhat lacking, especially piano. Also the only component requiring Windows XP, and not going to Windows 7. Have to record using the SPDIF output, because the internal recording runs hot on many songs and clips. Example of a good song for this TG: Anything in the XG folder, for example Waxed (authentic version).MID.
Yamaha MotifRack - Decent for certain GM files, although quite common for drum track to play as piano instead. Probably the worst in my collection for general playback, instead of music composition.
Roland SC8850 - Excellent for GM/GS/SC88/SC88Pro/SC8850 file playback, and the hardware that most later DOS and early Windows games were targeted at. Examples of good songs: Anything SC88Pro or SC8850 in this folder, in particular something like galuda_st3_2.MID.
Roland FantomXR - Excellent for GM playback, especially the piano. Example of a good song for this TG: rggza1.mid from Sonic 3D
Creative X-Fi Platinum - Very good bang for the buck, especially with the SGM soundfont. Good for many GM/GS files. Not a bad recording card for the SC8850 either.

PC

Not much special about the PC, it's a random pile of parts, including a P4 running at 3GHz.

Other

M-Audio Digipatch SPDIF switchbox. Remote controlled through MIDI signals output by the SW1000XG for automation. Input is all of the SPDIF capable tone generators, output goes to the X-Fi for recording.

Software

Program	Description
Apache	Web server
PHP	Scripting language for pages on site
MySQL	Database for storing song queue, information about songs, etc
ActiveState ActivePerl	Backend programming which holds everything together. Fetches songs from queue, switches volume levels on X-Fi inputs, sends MIDI commands to SPDIF switchbox.
KbMedia Player	MIDI player with full support for 32/64 track MIDI files, and good automation support. Also used to fill information in database about detected TG type.
Icecast	Free streaming server.
OddSock edcast	Realtime streaming from X-Fi to streaming server
HardDiskOgg	Realtime recording from X-Fi to various audio formats, with decent automation support. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you'd like a recording of a MIDI file on any of my hardware.

What it looks like from the server's desktop:

Questions? Comments? Send them to: fleshmank@hotmail.com