ASCII ROCK

January 21, 2008 12:37 PM

Before there was MTV, before mp3s or YouTube, there was ASCII ROCK!
posted by Anything (14 comments total)

Talk about textural music.
posted by aftermarketradio at 12:40 PM on January 21, 2008

So they took the music video, pumped the video through aalib and got a MIDI of the song to play simultaneously?
posted by Xoder at 12:46 PM on January 21, 2008

Cool. I'm going to have fun finding all sorts of stuff on that c505 website.

(I'm wondering how many 5.25" floppies one of those videos would have had to fit onto.)
posted by not_on_display at 12:51 PM on January 21, 2008

Somewhere, wherever computers go when they pass on, my Apple IIc is looking down on you like Lombardi.





... in the "What the hell's goin on around here!" way. Animated ASCII art is okay, but only for about 10 seconds.
posted by cashman at 1:15 PM on January 21, 2008

Deep ASCII does this for Deep Throat, in java, so it's actual characters instead of a quicktime movie of text. Big bandwidth savings there. Now we just need some ASCIIfied drugs and it's the holy trifecta.
posted by mumkin at 1:17 PM on January 21, 2008

(Oh, and Deep ASCII is probably NSFW. You'd want to be standing a good 15 or 20 feet back from the screen to resolve the image, though. Like maybe where your offended coworker is sitting. )
posted by mumkin at 1:32 PM on January 21, 2008

Thanks for the warning, mumkin. I thought I'd indirectly found the answer to this.

not really, but come on, that ostrich shit is bugging the hell out of me -that has to get solved.
posted by cashman at 1:42 PM on January 21, 2008

Why do I feel like this is a step forward?
posted by Bathtub Bobsled at 1:51 PM on January 21, 2008

Hey, it's WAY better than anything on MTV these days, sound included.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:00 PM on January 21, 2008

It's quite a cool post. And ZenMasterThis is completely right.
posted by micayetoca at 5:49 PM on January 21, 2008

I find it ironic that these files are so large. I mean, surely ASCII videos should be tiny, compressible, and viewed via Javascript or something.
posted by wastelands at 7:14 PM on January 21, 2008

You can view any movie in ascii mode with mplayer (at least on linux). Just use:

mplayer -vo aa video_file.xxx

It's pretty cool for the first minute or so, and then it just gives you a headache.
posted by chrisamiller at 10:51 PM on January 21, 2008

Mmm. Van Halen the right way.
posted by humannaire at 1:13 AM on January 22, 2008

Aw fuck it. Van Halen the right way done right.
posted by humannaire at 1:30 AM on January 22, 2008