Bach to the Future!

CPU Bach is a program that Sid Meier wrote for the 3DO that composes music in the style of JS Bach.

If you download this (24 megabytes), you can get 101 minutes of very pleasant very-Bach-like music to listen to. It's really good. Listening to it reminds me of listening to an NPR Sunday morning show.

I have an old 3DO machine hooked up to my stereo with the CPU Bach disk in it. The program never gained much popularity because it was only on the 3DO. Meier put it on the 3DO because at the time it had superior sound output compared to the PC (this is 10 years ago?).

Anyway, turning on the 3DO machine results in it automatically composing and playing Bach-like music. So I captured 101 minutes of it which I put into this huge 240 megabyte mp3 file. If I posted that, and four people downloaded it, then my bandwidth limit of a gigabyte a day would be used up ... I needed more compression ... I listened closely to the music and decided that there wasn't that much going on frequency-wise, and that I could probably compress it down to a really small wma file that would sound good. So I did, and that's what's posted. The resulting file is only 24 megs and it sounds quite pleasant.

Bach to the future!