In the case of canyon.mid there is because it was composed for a specific midi instrument with a particular set of timbres.

Or to put it another way, it’s music and therefore complicated.

I am reminded of Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, which let the PC speaker output something beyond just bleeps and bloops.

Are you talking about the 90s or now? Because those were all at least as true then as now. Everything took forever. You needed more RAM every month. Everything crashed constantly. I had to reinstall Win98SE so many fucking times that I can still type F73WT-WHD3J-CD4VR-2GWKD-T38YD from memory.

The amount of suck in commercial software is constant. Companies always prioritize adding the shiny-looking features that sell software to rubes over improving things like memory use, response time, and general quality of life until the quality of life is actually bad enough to drive customers to another vendor, so it's perpetually bad enough to keep the average customer right on the edge of "oh fuck this, I'm switching to something else."

My whole machine reboots in less than 10 seconds. I haven’t seen a blue screen of death in a decade. I haven’t had significant data loss from a failed drive or a corrupt machine in.. I can’t remember. Even DaVinci Resolve is ready to run in a few short seconds.

This is all on a machine I bought 6-8 years ago. I reboot my phone and watch and laptop when I think to, not because I have to. I run half a dozen browsers and hundreds of tabs and play YouTube while waiting for a remote machine to deploy to an immutable temp instance that gets destroyed after every test cycle.

I speak to my AIs and I can live and work anywhere on this planet that legally allows me.

There are problems in our world and on our machines and in our governments but apps don’t take 10 seconds to load.

Except ServiceNow. I’ll give you that one.

Part of my job when I was a youngn, was rebooting the Windows NT server running the software router because packets stopped forwarding for the entire net cafe.

Every generation has its hype cycle; it's nothing new.

Having said that, I wasn’t the only person deeply upset when Greenspan gave the green light for Bush’s tax cuts. Under Clinton we were on track to wipe out the debt in another 10 years.

No words for how this game blew my mind back in those days...

(… although there are sometimes "seed" rounds that precede a series A, or even pre-seed rounds … like everything else, it's complicated & messy. But hopefully you see the metaphor the parent was trying to paint.)

I'm aware of ReplayGain and this processing is important for per-track overall gain, but what I'm getting at is lower level: instead of there being two lossy/rounded stages of dimming and amplification, you want to communicate to the OS a log2 "dimming factor", so that this can be subtracted from a later log2 amplification factor such that we ideally waste no processing time if the sum is zero, and otherwise don't suffer the twice-quantised signal degradation (at most one accurate scaling pass, instead of two arbitrarily precision-reducing ones). It's maybe a minor point / imperceptible as others have noted, but IMO this seems like the Correct (TM) approach.

Clearly there is a need to give different volumes to different apps, so you can have quiet background music while a timer app is louder, or Zoom is louder.

Ideally there would be an OS-level mixer to independently set the volume of each app. I believe Windows has this, Mac definitely doesn't. And for convenience, an app's local volume control would exist, but set it at the OS mixer level, so you don't have them competing with each other.

But without this, an app does have to have local volume controls.

Also, it's important to be able to set gain as well, i.e. turn the volume "above 100%". For those YouTube videos that for some reason are only 5% as loud as other videos. Even better is if you can set the gain per-video so that it won't be absurdly loud and clipping when you move on to the next video.

Bonus points if an OS or media player ever gives the option of a dynamic compressor, so you can actually listen to those amateur podcasts where one speaker's microphone is 10x quieter than another's. Or listen to the quiet parts of classical music recordings even in the presence of background noise.

Clicks for the click God!

The monitor is the standard Tandy VGA monitor of the system's era. The styling on the speakers feel newer than the RSX's 1991 launch, they're more what I'd expect from the mid to late 90s.

You had to upgrade the VGA chip's BIOS to use Win 95 on it:

> The ACUMOS VGA graphics can be software-updated with Cirrus Logic BIOS (via MS-DOS driver) to allow VESA/SVGA to function in Windows 95, as the Windows 3.xx Tandy VGA drivers are insufficient for Windows 95.

ref: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Tandy_1000_R-Series

I think the background image is probably authentic, it has the feel of a mid-late 90s digital camera picture. It reads to me as the desk of someone who is trying to keep that system alive long past its prime years. Which were arguably over before they started, given 486 systems had been available for a bit when this launched. We end up with an early 90s system with a handful of mid-late 90s peripherals.

The bigger problem to me is this sounds like MIDI played back on a sound card with FM synthesis. The 1000 RSX had the poorly supported Tandy 3 tones + DAC sound hardware. You could install an AdLib, Sound Blaster, or other card to give it MIDI FM synth capability, but the base system can't do it. Alas, we can't see the back to see if it has such an upgrade...

When I was a kid, I was using Windows 95 for a while when Me was already a thing - newer versions could technically run, but the experience wasn't great on that hardware. You could even still find Windows 3.11 computers at my school at the time. Computers don't go die at the exact moment a successor becomes available on the market.