SoundBlaster AWE32/64 was the bees knees before the invention of MP3s.
Today nobody uses MIDI, but how else are you going to play music with 8MB of RAM?
Musicians still use MIDI
That is true, but I bet they’re not doing it with a 30 year old ISA card.
Most aren’t no, but the thing with synth nerds is that if they want a specific sound, they’ll dive through a flaming hoop wearing a barbed wire straitjacket to make it happen.
There are 100% a few people people fucking around with old ISA cards for musical purposes
Why not just dump the Sound Fonts and use them in modern multitrack MIDI software?
Sound fonts are effectively sample banks, a lot of earlier soundcards are basically full synthesisers just without a control panel or keys.
There will be various elements of how the operators and effects work or any nonlinearity introduced by the circuits that will not necessarily be reflected in a sound font
This is a nice blast (no pun intended) from the past. I put one of these in my first new and fully built PCs back around 1994. I had 30-pin SIMMs left over from my previous 386 that worked well in the add-on slots. That was about the coolest thing on that 486 since I went with a VLB video card and couldn’t afford a CD-ROM. I think I ran with the AWE32 through several upgrades until I bought an off-the-shelf HP in 2000.
Sure would be nice if Creative could deliver a driver fix for my soundcard’s channel swapping. Thing isn’t even a decade old.
Chad Linux strikes again 💪
