marcus256's music experiments [DONE]

Hi!

I just heard about Xonotic, and I think it's a really good step. I've been playing Nexuiz some hours now and then, and love it - it's plain simple frag fun! I hope Xonotic will take it to the next step (I have some ideas that I would like to share, but in another thread...).

Anyway, I was working on a piece of music, and thought I'd share it - it may be of interest (or not). It's kind of up-beat, and not really finished yet.

Space Base.mp3 (WIP)

EDIT: Final version is here: Space_Base-1.1.ogg

If anyone has any comments I'd love to hear them - I've never made game music before.

BTW - The name has nothing to do with the map with the same name - it's a pure coincidence...

EDIT: After reading up on the music guidelines (which all make sense), I realize that there may be too much high pitch instruments at places, and the Woo! Yeah! voices are probably also too much... Also, I have to work on the length/looping of course. Please comment!

ill just have to say mate , i couldnt fault this one bit ,it sounds great , flows well , sound isnt to high , very well done!

what a great tune to hear , ty very much sir!

:^

Very nice stuff! Love how much music we seem to be getting into Xonotic

BTW hope you are ready to accept the terms here: http://dev.xonotic.org/projects/xonotic/wiki/Legal (see the Audio section)
That means that if you want your music included in the official release, you need to release the sources (often simply the project file), and can't use samples that aren't compatible to the GPL.

...and can't use samples that aren't compatible to the GPL.

Hmmmm... As far as I know I only used the following sample sources (all are "free", but I'm not sure about GPL compatibility):

Maz no.1 instruments - bought a copy (though I "owned" them now)
Looperman drum loops - free loops
The samples included with the ReNoise demo.

Are those OK? Are there any simple workarounds if not (like re-editing those samples).

Even if there are license incompatibilities, there should be enough musicians here to help You out with similar samples or nice replacements.

Btw, nice tune! i wouldn't use it for playing, but it would be great for a menu or video.

Overall I really like the track, but I think the voices that were added (they start playing at 1:30 into the track) sound a bit whack. Removing them would probably improve the track. The track sounds really good and reminiscent of the stuff I'd hear in an early PlayStation game released in 96 (back when CD videogame music sounded like kick ass videogame music) which is a VERY good thing.

Thanks for the comments!

With the positive reviews, I'll keep working on it some more, and release it under some CC-license. Hope it will be useful

OK!

Here is the final (?) version, including the "source":

Space_Base-1.1.ogg

Space_Base-1.1.xrns

Haven't decided for a license yet, but some sort of CC, I guess.

Edit: The song is released under the CC-BY license.

Also, I am not sure about the looping part. I tried to set the vorbis LOOP_START parameter to 14,9067 seconds, but I have not found a software yet to try it with...

Edit: Loop works fine in nexuiz, so should work OK I hope.

Just a quick note: previously, the OGG-file was encoded using -q 5, now I've re-encoded it using -q 7 (as recommended).

Hey! You've created a great piece of music! I love it

It has some oldschoolish good feel that I was looking in recent games but without success. This reminds me a bit the music from Unreal The game with the best music I have ever played
I'd love to hear this one on some big'n'spacey CTF map. Or in promotional movies for Xonotic. But I think that leaving this track to only play in movies would be a pity.

It's so good that I think it has to get in-game

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As for looping the track - I use Audacity to do it.

If you'r track have one tempo through whole time, you can generate a click track which will simply help you see musical measures in your exported track. Then you can select the region you want to be looping, make sure your selection is precise and won't cut-off some important hit at the beginning. Use 'Z' key to make the selection borders go to nearest zero-crossing point - that will help you avoid clicks in the loop. Then you can select the units for displaying selection's start and end positions. Set those to samples. You'll see some big numbers There is also a switch that will alter the behavior. You can display the length of selection or it's end position. We want the second option. Now you just need to copy (re-type) those numbers to your Ogg tags I think I might make a video on how to do this

This reminds me a bit the music from Unreal The game with the best music I have ever played

Funny... I really, really loved the original Unreal music too (among the best game music on the PC).

However, for me nothing beats the first impressions from the Last Ninja on the C=64 (probably because it was among the first times game music was taken so seriously, both in quality and in setting the theme for the game). I also quite enjoyed Hired Guns on the Amiga at the time, as well (to name a few).

Thanks for the positive feedback

PS. I solved the looping by simply looping the tune in ReNoise, and recorded one pattern longer than I needed to ensure that all the instruments faded out properly to get a clean cut over.