Happy Independence Day from Twin Cities Maker! We hope all of our members and friends are enjoying this national holiday and staying safe!
Today I bring you a little virtual version of Independence Day!
First, I’ve made a high quality synthetic recording of John Phillips Sousa’s Stars and Strips Forever. This was recorded from a midi file and played back using the excellent midi input plugin in XMPlay. I’ve done a lot of work selecting high quality soundfonts and tweaking the real time DSP for this star quality performance. Click the picture below to access this MP3 file:
I think this sounds pretty realistic, but for comparison you can hear Sousa recordings from the real world at dws.org.
My other virtual goody for the day is to point you to the excellent Skyrocket screensaver from Really Slick Screensavers. This screensaver is simply outstanding, but may require a computer with a bit of graphics oomph to run with high quality settings.
From the website:
“The most full-blown fireworks screensaver ever. It has bright lights, smoke trails, clouds that are illuminated by the explosions, sound effects, and plenty of other eye candy. Keyboard commands allow you to launch various types of rockets, pause the movement of the fireworks, and control the camera with the mouse. OpenGL is used for the graphics and OpenAL is used for the sound.”
Click the image below to visit Really Slick Screensavers and grab the Skyrocket screensaver. The author has created a lot of other fantastic screensavers too, so check them out!
For a real virtual blast, try playing the midi file in a loop and running the screensaver at the same time! It’s an out of this world experience!
