... Creative Labs, having a stranglehold on the market, was slow to move beyond its FM synthesis. With very little competition in its price range, Creative Labs had very little incentive to move beyond FM. (This is why so many people are familiar with FM synthesis...a 1970's technology). However, with the General MIDI specification available to any manufacturer, many companies jumped into market (not necessarily music companies).
The result was a breed of music devices that would give General MIDI a bad reputation. Many of these devices were very poor in sound quality. I should know. I was a victim in this market.
Creative Labs, to compete in this new market invented several devices. The first was the Wave Blaster. Creative Labs designed some of their SB16's to have a special port so you could attach a piggyback board designed to do General MIDI. They would then sell the Wave Blaster as a $200 option to your sound card, bringing you "Wavetable synthesis" and "MT-32 compatibility".
Dazzled by the two claims, I foolishly bought one of these units. I am no stranger to the MT-32 as one of my friends had one for many years. I always loved the sound quality, but never could afford it. Now here was a device at less than half the price which claimed to be of MT-32 quality. I bought the device and will forever regret that day.
When I put it in, I could tell it was far better than FM, but it still sounded pretty bad. I worked with the card for days, trying to make sure there weren't any options I needed to turn on. Desperate, I eventually called Creative Technical Support asking why it sounded so bad. They tried to convince me that they personally liked it better than the MT-32. I then realized I had been ripped-off.
How bad did it sound? Well, I usually describe it to people as this: "Imagine a rock hitting a metal plate. That is their idea of a piano. Except...you would expect the metal to vibrate with an echoing sound. The Wave Blaster had no reverb or chorus capabilities whatsoever. So remove the echo from the image. Thus you have an incredibly bad, artificial sound."
Wave Blaster was so bad, they pulled it from the market several months later and introduced Wave Blaster 2. This was an improvement, but still a far cry from the ancient MT-32.
I soon discovered a new sound card coming out. The Roland Sound Canvas Daughterboard. Roland took their normal SC and adapted it to fit in the WaveBlaster slot. I quickly sold my Wave Blaster off to one of my roommates that had probably gone deaf from playing his stereo too loud, and bought this miraculous device. This was 180 degrees from my Wave Blaster. Roland was quick to admit that though the SC actually has MT-32 sounds built into the device, it cannot understand MT-32 sysex, and thus cannot faithfully reproduce MT-32 music. However, it's GM/GS is wonderful.
Meanwhile, to further advance their sound card control, Creative Labs introduced the Sound Blaster 32 and the AWE32. The Sound Blaster 32 was essentially, a SB16+Waveblaster2. This was fully GM compliant, but it didn't sound that good. Creative Labs was more interested in pushing their own proprietary, AWE32. This one is not fully GM compliant. It was cheaper for them to produce, and it accepted, it would allow them to control the next generation of Sound Card standards (as they did with Sound Blaster).
The AWE32 sacrificed some of the required onboard ROM for GM instruments and used RAM so you could load software instruments, very much like the Gravis Ultrasound. However, since this was their own technology, they did not adhere to any standards. Thus you had to find products that supported the AWE32 directly. This was a problem at first, since the world was still DOS based. Games like Doom had problems for awhile supporting the AWE32. Eventually Creative Labs resolved most of their compatibility problems, especially with the introduction of Windows 95. And the AWE32 sold on brand name and technology-specs, without most people even hearing how it sounds.
Furthermore, because some of the technology was a copy of the GUS, many of the features were never utilized for the same reasons. (Tom was recently asked if he could record and download the MT-32 samples into the AWE32 Soundfonts banks, but Tom replied there are just to many MT-32 sounds to be feasible.)
Also, most game manufacturers composed General MIDI on a Roland Sound Canvas. One of the "flaws" of the GM specification was the lack of requirements of how an instrument should sound. The companies argued this was to allow artistic freedom, but it produced cards like Wave Blaster. The particular flaw in this case, however, was the balancing. Certain instruments might sound louder on a AWE32 than a Sound Canvas, making the song sound really bad. Creative Labs did not give much consideration to the Sound Canvas standards and produced a card that had many incorrect balances.
...
The Death of MIDI
CD-ROM was finally being equipped in every computer. A new fad was born: Red Book Audio (or CD music). People started demanding CD music with games because their MIDI sounded so bad either through FM synthesis, or bad wavetable. The other problem was many midi compositions were not necessarily that good because it requires some work to become a good MIDI musician.
In the early stages, some companies simply composed GM songs on the Sound Canvas and then recorded those songs onto CD for those without Sound Canvases. Warcraft 2 and Hexen are two examples.
But ultimately, MIDI was dropped for CD music completely. This was a disappointment to a minority of gamers that loved the concept of "Dynamic Music". Dynamic music is music played while you are playing a game, but the parts of the music change as you do different things. Perhaps the best implementation of this was in LucasArts' TIE Fighter. Basically, just by the music you could tell what was going on during the whole battle. There was no need for annoying, pointless radio chatter (which should only be used for useful information) because the music could tell you if a wingman died, if you were being shot at, if you scored a kill, if an enemy ship was jumping in, if a friendly ship was jumping in, etc.
But this art died with the push for CD music.