Some ramblings on mue [sic]

[lethargic_man]

Having recently moved house, I set up the other day and plugged in my Beeb and Hybrid Music System, and booted it up to have a tinkle on the ivories plastics. Previously when doing this I've been disciplined and made myself go through all the scales first, to bring my standard of playing back up from pretty awful to almost tolerable. The problem about that is that by the time I've gone through all the scales, I no longer feel like playing everything. This time I gave up halfway and had fun struggling through the Bach fughetta I impressed my piano teacher with fourteen years ago playing in one of her show-off-the-students concerts without using any music.

The following evening I fired it up again to listen to the AMPLE album "Ashes" by Michael Harbour, who would be highly embarrassed to know I was still listening to it. Harbour wrote the album aged sixteen; five years later on looking for my place in an exam in my second year at Cambridge, I noticed "Harbour M." a few places behind me. I went up to talk to him afterward, and to my horror and his mortification, I went into gushing fan mode. Why do people do that? The album's not the best piece of music in the world... but it is one of the AMPLE pieces I still listen to after all this time.

The output of the Hybrid Music System sounds pretty cheesy nowadays -- very much computer-generated (though at the time you'd have had to have paid a lot more to get a higher quality computer music system). Whilst listening it occurred to me (for the nth time) it would be nice to be able to convert the music to something modern simply so it can sound better. (Robin Terry has converted AMPLE for Risc OS, however I don't have a Risc PC, and it still sounds somewhat computer-generated IMO.) A few years ago I copied everything I still had on 5.25" disks, including my collection of AMPLE pieces, onto CD-ROM, so I can get to the programs from my PC. Now it occurred to me to wonder whether the programs were tokenised or in plaintext; so I moved my hands from my Beeb's keyboard to that of my laptop -- and the gears of my brain promptly completely jammed up. I'd started to type "rise12" LOAD SHOW, and my brain had to fight past such alternatives as *TY. rise12 before I finally got it back into Linux gear and was able to come up with less rise12.

(And the upshot of the story: The AMPLE is is tokenised, so the files I have are useless to me unless I (a) painstakingly transfer them across again in plaintext, (b) write a detokeniser of my own (working out how to do so in the first place), or (c) get a Beeb emulator for luminiferous. However, it's not the end of the world as I wasn't particularly planning to do anything with them now anyway.)