SID of the day: Smo0oth Crimin4l by Owen Crowley (CRD)
6 October 2009 19:32:59
SID of the day
Smo0oth Crimin4l by Owen Crowley (CRD)
I'm not the world's biggest Michael Jackson fan, but do like some of
his songs, this being one of them. In my opinnion Smooth Criminal (and
this SID) makes it clear why Michael Jackson's music is not
your usual pop music that you can barely notice from all that
background noise. Late events with HVSC
and Michael Jackson make this SID a great pick as SID of the Day.
Permalink | Comments (0)
HVSC and me
6 October 2009 13:00:54
misc
Now that I'm done with up to date copy of
High Voltage SID Collection I'm
not sure if I should laugh or cry. In a way I should be happy to
finish something as time consuming as this but on the other hand I feel
sorry that's it's done. How did it all begin? While I've always been
great fan of chip
music, I started to actively listen SIDs as late as in 2001. Until
then I had only listened to my favourite songs from my Commodore 64
times. I'm not sure what happened back in 2001, but I got this great
idea of listening all songs in HVSC. At first I did very little
progress. I ofter had the same song players for tens of minutes if not
hours. I started from root directory of HVSC and entered directories
manually one by one. On the bright side I only needed to keep track of
current file. In any case all this trouble caused me to practically
forget my plans. At this point I was listening to HVSC 4.2 (update 27),
which contained around 16000 SIDs.
Then maybe a year or two later I started listening to SIDs again. I
also realised that I needed a better player if I was ever planning to
see my plans through. I knew exactly what I needed: a player that would
change songs after a few minutes and a keyboard shortcut that would
have the player skip to the next song. Luckily this was easily done
with combination of command line player such as sidplay2, Perl and
extensively configurable window manager such as
FVMW2. In late 2005, during the new
year break, I was finished with HVSC. Little I knew...
The update to HVSC 44 was big. Apart from changing the numbering
scheme, HVSC 44 contained almost twice as many files as 4.2 did. Since
many files were either renamed, moved or updated, I decided not to try
to follow the updates but to start from zero. I decided that I would
listen through HVSC 44 like HVSC had 4.2 never happened. I was glad to
realise that HVSC now came with song length information, so after a few
tweaks to my Perl-script I was all set for another go.
After four years, some updates to the player script and fine collection
of scripts to determine changes in HVSC, I have now listened every
single song, including subsongs, in HVSC 51. I'm still unsure why I did
this but I'm glad I did it. SIDs have been great source of joy, and at
times, peace, when things have gone noisy or hectic at work. Although
many songs are simply horrible, most are fine when played on the
background. There are many songs I like and some that I really love. I
have collected a list of songs I have liked during the years. I may not
agree with all the songs on it today, but at the time I liked every
single one of them. You can get the list
here.
And then some figures. All in all I have now listened some 60,000
individual SID files. According to Songlengths.txt, HVSC 51
consists of 36,937 files that total in 53,815 subsongs or 1639 hours or
68 days. Since I haven't listened all songs entirely, I cannot use
these numbers as averages directly. It is simply impossible to tell
how much time I have spent listening to SIDs, but considering the fact
that for example I have listened
/MUSICIANS/B/Beben_Wally/Tetris.sid for days if not weeks, I
think it only fair to say I have listened to SIDs for at least
68 days. I even think I can go as far as to say that I have listened to
SIDs for 68 * (60000 files / 36937 files * 0.75) = 83 days.
What about the artists? According to my list of
favourites my top-11 preferred list of artists goes as follows.
- Rob Hubbard (14 songs)
- Sean Connolly (12)
- Chris Huelsbeck (11)
- Jeroen Tel (10)
- Laxity (9)
- Thomas Detert (9)
- Tomas Danko (9)
- Glenn Gallefoss (8)
- Johannes Bjerregaard (8)
- Geir Tjelta (7)
- Dwayne Bakewell (7)
Permalink | Comments (0)