You Guys Need A Music Man?

[thefallenalchemist]

Well guys, I'm very skilled when it comes to selecting music and have quite a collection of my own. Something's been bugging me forever and I finally fixed it last night.

Zero doesn't have his own seperate starman theme, which I always thought was weird. So I pulled up a newly recorded version of his original X1 theme that was re-recorded for Megaman Zero. It's a small 3.41 mb file, and I can upload it if you guys would use it in the next version,  even though it's a literal two seconds of work to program manually into MKFMUSIC.DLL

I also used the arrange victory music for Megaman X3 as the flagpole theme. It seems to fit much better. For Vile, I found a slightly higher quality arrange of the original music that is currently used for him. I also used the victory music from Megaman Irregular Hunter X, since it is his offical victory music.

I seem to notice that MKF uses a wide variety of music, and I would be more than happy to find arranged, remixed and other sort of fare that you could use to improve the basic music that comes with the game. I've listened to gaming music all of my life, and music is a very big part of gaming for me. I still remember in 2nd grade being asked to describe my favorite song at the time, but would up drawing the train stage from Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword Of Chaos.

I know that the stage designers get to choose their own music for their stages, but I'm just trying to improve upon quality. It might sound trivial, but it's something I wouldn't mind helping out with. If you guys need any special remixes, (I recommend something from Dark Side Of Phobos rather than Alice In Chains - Rooster MIDI BTW) I can hunt them down and upload them.

Just let me know. Again, I know the game allows you to mix it your own way, but I'm just trying to improve the vanilla version. I also personally don't think that MIDI should be used in the game. There's plenty of great renditions out there which can be used. It also gives the game a flash and flair, like I got from the new version of the demon world music, and the orchestral rendition of Sky Fortress Zone. Man, that was epic.

[TheomanZero]

It sounds like you may be keeping this in mind, but we're trying to keep the music pack from getting too large.  If you're going to do this, make sure to use small formats and try to avoid increasing the total number of tracks, at least by very much.
If you can do that, this could be interesting.

[Din]

Feel free to share some samples!

[thefallenalchemist]

I'll send some stuff in a few days. It'll b a while before I can upload, but I also feel that I need to play all of the stages in the game first, and then change out music in certain ones to see if tracks I've got may be better/worse than the originals. I don't make my own music - well, yeah I do - but it's nothing you can use in a game. I just have plenty of high quality soundtracks and musical covers from bands/groups/exc. throughout the years and I can definitely add some flair to the vanilla soundtrack.

Again, it'll be a few days or weeks - but I'll have something. I'm sure that 0.6 isn't going to just come out tommorrow, so I have plenty of time to make a good selection with the material that I've amassed over the years. Of course there is a great deal of music that I would never touch. I especially like the mario world music, but I do believe that I need to hunt down a good cover or arrange of World 8 from SMB3.

I'll keep hunting around.

I'm doing Oggs and small file size mp3's. Shouldn't be too much bigger. I can convert anything to Ogg, or go from 320 to 192 or 128 on mp3s. But anything lower than 128 is crap. Ill keep it small, so don't worry.

[Wetwoo]

MKF's soundtrack is already big enough. But if you will submit music, make sure it's the highest quality it can be. The devs will convert them to OGGs. There is very little loss in sound quality in the conversion to OGG as long as the source file is high quality to begin with.

[thefallenalchemist]

I can always convert them into OGGs myself, and then send a zip file with various tracks and a PDF that would contain all of the possible uses for each of the tracks that I've selected. Surprisingly, the starman and flagpole themes are not in OGG, as well as two tracks in the music folder. Just curious as to why that is.

I understand that we've got to keep this filesize as small as possible, and I'm pretty sure the entire game will still be close to a gig upon completion. Nonetheless, I will do no transcoding and will deliver the files in the quality that I originally have them, and then they will be converted straight to Oggs, and sent to...

Who do I send these files to, exactly? I was just going to put them up as a mediafire link, (in one big zipped folder of course) and have one of the dev's download them. But I don't know who I need to PM, so please send me that info and I'll begin the whole conversion process. I'm sure that you won't use everything I've selected, but I'm sure that you will find that most of this music could help benefit the game.

[EvilMariobot]

Surprisingly, the starman and flagpole themes are not in OGG. Just curious as to why that is.

I'd say to make it easier to use with skinmods. That's not to say I haven't had issues with the .wav files.

[thefallenalchemist]

Just about finished with the files. Biggest file size is a little over 4 mb. Mainly seems to be guitar oriented, but there are electronic and atmospheres as well as other arranged music. Use what you can, trash what you can't use. I guess I'll just make another thread with the link tommorrow after I upload it. It's all Oggs.

[CambridgeSMERSH]

I don't know if it's appropriate to put it in this topic, but I have an idea on how to cut down on the amount of Oggs in the soundtrack. How about in future versions, we reuse Battle for Sera's train theme for Transiberian Trek, and remove the BGMs for both Running of the Bulls and the moose chase segment of Yellowstone Journey and replace them with Hot Pursuit (from DKC3)?

[Wetwoo]

In Super Mario Fusion Revival, one of the things decided upon from day one is to have a small universal pool of music for the soundtrack. There is a "plains" BGM, two action level BGMs, an athletic BGM, a Ghost House BGM, a fortress BGM, an airship BGM, a boss BGM, and a default World Boss BGM, which are all used universally throughout the game. We have a few world-specific level-type BGMs, such as a high-tech fortress BGM and demon plains BGM. All those songs in the soundtrack, converted to oggs and looped, amount to about 32MB. SMFR v0.3's total download size, including the music, is just 55MB.

One early issue with MKF's design approach was that level designers (myself included) kept designing levels that use 2, 3, or even 4 songs each. Almost none of those songs are ever used again elsewhere, so each new level added a big chunk of MB to the soundtrack size, resulting in the hundreds of MB size MKF soundtrack being a separate download. Nostalgia overruled common sense back then. Nowadays, the devs are being conservative adding new music to the game, so you may submit, but do not expect them to be officially added to the game.

[Lars Luron]

Yeah, we've been trying to cut down on a lot of the music we've bee using, so a lot of the stuff you might submit, like that custom Cyberdemon boss theme, aren't going to work. In fact right now it's impossible to have custom themes for individual bosses even with the playlist feature, since they're all tied to a single track- you can't change the boss music without changing it for all the bosses that use that theme.

[thefallenalchemist]

I understand.