Excuse me while I Ad Lib this...

So... back in the diz-ay while I was a freshman at OSU, I had a roomee by the name of Todd. He was cool. His computer was cool. It was a DOS machine of course. Probably DOS 5. He even had a sound card. An Ad Lib sound card, one of the first commercially available (and useful) sound cards available. He used to create crazy ass music with the music software that came with it, namely, Visual Composer and Instrument Maker. Visual Composer let you, well, visually compose music with a little graphical keyboard. Instrument Maker let you craft 'instruments' by tweaking FM Synthesis values (at least I think it was FM synthesis). He had albums (or cassettes) of this stuff. Rodomontodd is the title of one I can remember. And I thought the stuff was fantastic since it didn't always conform to what one would normally call music. Sometimes there wasn't a specific melody. Sometimes, it seemingly lacked structure all together. Until you looked at it in Visual Composer. Then it made all the sense in the world. It was like painting music. But Todd spent only a couple of quarters at OSU and then he went away. Taking with him his Ad Lib rigged computer and his cool ass software and music.

Around 1997, after finding another tape of music he had given me, I looked him up again on that new fangled and growing by the day thing called the Internet. We got back together and began making music together. Not in a gay way but in a musician way. Unless you talk to the cashiers at Kroger's, then they might swear by the previous.

Annnnnyyyyywwwaaaaayyyssss, from the minute we got back together, we had talked about getting that Ad Lib software back up and running. Unfortunately, we have difficulty in doing so. Windows had come along and DOS was going by the way side. Neither of us had DOS disks anymore. We tried for years in vain to get it to work. 10 years to be exact. But to no avail.

Then, the other day, a mutual friend to Todd and I posted some old music for a group that consisted of Todd. Of course, it was some of the Ad Lib music stuff. So again, my interest was piqued and I began trying to figure out a way to get this running again. I figured I might try loading up Windows 95 on an old PC I have at home and seeing if maybe I could resurrect the Ad Lib music software. I still had all the binaries with me since I made copies of the disks during the one moment in 1997 when Todd had located them. I believe he's not sure where they are at the moment. No matter. I have the files.

Recently, I also started getting back into old game emulation. Things like emulators for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, the Sega Master System, etc. As I was surfing today, I ran across a sweet little program called DosBox. It's been around for a few years and I even remember telling a friend about it a few months back when he was getting into playing the hundreds of old DOS games he still had lying around. I had totally forgotten about it until I stumbled over it again today.

So this evening, I came home and DL'd DOS Box and found the Ad Lib software on my drive and gave it a run. And wouldn't you know it. It f^@#ing worked!!!

I present to you, the first song written by me (and quite possibly anyone else in the world) on the Ad Lib Visual Composer, which features the scrapings of a custom instrument called 'screech' created in Instrument Maker. The song is called "Yeah Baby!" for 'yeah baby' I got the Ad Lib stuff working!!! Wheeee!!! Enjoy!

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Here's what it looks like in Visual Composer.