For All You Hip-Hop Heads Out There

[Neuro]

I made a couple of beats based on the same one song from ROTT... (I'm sure you'll know what it is right off the bat). Check 'em out...

http://kiwi6.com/file/fja4ht2li2

http://kiwi6.com/file/0at7tx1ucc

[Malvineous]

Nice! Always good to get some more remixes of these games. They always seem to get missed out on the bigger remix sites.

I did find the first one a little difficult to listen to though - it seems to have too much treble in the percussion which is quite hard on my ears. I really liked the second one though, although the MP3 file seems corrupted as my player says it goes for seven minutes, but it goes quiet after about 1:20 and I get errors if I try to seek.

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by Malvineous

on the bigger remix sites

BTW, any good suggestions for those? I usually look for remixes on YouTube

[Malvineous]

I haven't looked for a long time actually, once I found you can download torrents of ocremix.org. These have kept me busy for a long time!

Unfortunately, at least on OCRemix, it seems that most of the remixes are of Final Fantasy, which gets a bit samey. I've yet to find any remixes at all of some of my favourite game music (mostly Apogee/id/3DR.) If you know of any (that aren't on OCRemix) let me know!

[Phil Carter]

Originally Posted by Malvineous

I've yet to find any remixes at all of some of my favourite game music (mostly Apogee/id/3DR.)

There’s the Ashes remix from Wacky Wheels. I got it from VGmix, back when that site had more than a picture of a dog on it.

The music page of my site has a couple live performances of Wacky Wheels music too. (I really need to update my site... there are no links to the music page anywhere on the site.)

[Malvineous]

Ah yes, the Ashes remix is a good one (incidentally, going through your site linked me back to this post about the Wacky Wheels engine, which makes a lot more sense now after the work we both did for Camoto!)

I do think it's a shame a game like Wacky Wheels has such a small number of remixes. But then as far as I'm aware there are no remixes at all for Xargon, Cosmo, Heretic, Halloween Harry, Bio Menace, Major Stryker and the list goes on. If only I had some musical talent :-)

I don't think there were many (any?) remixes of ROTT either, before this post and the remake.

[Phil Carter]

I just downloaded the ROTT remixes. The length of both MP3s looked correct to me in my music player. There was silence for 5 or 10 seconds at the end of each track, which surprised me a bit, but neither track looked 7 minutes long.

As for the treble in the first track, it sounds fine to me. The hi-hat is pretty prominent, and could be quieter, but I don’t think it needs to be. Maybe Malvineous and I should compare notes and determine who has better stereo equipment and equalization.

Both tracks start and stop pretty abruptly, but with the silence at the end of each track, I couldn’t check to see if they were designed to loop. Still, it’s nice work. I liked thenew.mp3 in particular. Alas, I don’t think I’ve heard the original. Is there somewhere I can download the original music to ROTT, or can I extract it from the shareware game?

Did anyone check VGmix for Apogee remixes before the site disappeared? I only remember looking for Wacky Wheels remixes.

[Malvineous]

IIRC the ROTT music is contained in the 'goodies', which is now a free download. I think thenew.mp3 is Mist Ache, and war.mp3 is Task Force.

I think the problem is that in thenew.mp3 the percussion is much louder than the rest of the song, so I have the volume up to hear it, but then the perc is too loud. I'll put it down to the fact that since I can still hear a 20kHz dog whistle quite clearly my hearing must be too sensitive :-)

(BTW Phil, what do you use for equalisation? My budget 5.1 amp doesn't have an EQ so I'm using an ALSA plugin, but it's always caused me issues, so I'm curious to know how you're solving the problem.)

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by Phil Carter

Is there somewhere I can download the original music to ROTT, or can I extract it from the shareware game?

You can extract the shareware version's tunes using a tool like Game File Explorer or Dragon UnPacker, they're just plain MIDIs. The entire soundtrack, on the other hand, can be obtained from placed like Game Music Base.

Originally Posted by Malvineous

IIRC the ROTT music is contained in the 'goodies', which is now a free download. I think thenew.mp3 is Mist Ache, and war.mp3 is Task Force.

Cool, I didn't know that I only have MusicallyInspired's SC-55 pack. The MP3's are the originals from Lee Jackson, right?

[Malvineous]

Those SC-55 versions are really good too, I'd forgotten about them.

I'm not sure what you mean about the MP3s being from Lee Jackson? The MP3 filenames in my message were the names of the files the OP posted, and the goodies download contains the original MIDI files (which I assume are no different to the ones you would extract yourself, but I've never checked.) I'm not aware of Lee Jackson having ever released any MP3s. Although he did do that one .mod of "Oww!"...

[Phil Carter]

Originally Posted by Malvineous

I think the problem is that in thenew.mp3 the percussion is much louder than the rest of the song, so I have the volume up to hear it, but then the perc is too loud. I'll put it down to the fact that since I can still hear a 20kHz dog whistle quite clearly my hearing must be too sensitive :-)

(BTW Phil, what do you use for equalisation? My budget 5.1 amp doesn't have an EQ so I'm using an ALSA plugin, but it's always caused me issues, so I'm curious to know how you're solving the problem.)

I was using the built-in equalization in mocp, or so I thought... But at some point, I got a new version of mocp where the equalization stopped working, and I didn’t notice until yesterday. It seems that I haven’t been using equalization in months, possibly since I switched to Arch Linux. So I don’t have any good software equalization recommendations at the moment. I also need to find a new curses-based music player—mocp has some nice features, but it’s too buggy. A while back, I briefly looked for a JACK equalizer. I didn’t find anything to my liking, but there must be one out there, if you want to use JACK. (I don’t use JACK anymore.)

Today, I dusted off my old hardware equalizer that my dad bought in the ’80s. (This model.) Now that it’s hooked up and I have a properly equalized stereo system, I can say that Malvineous is completely correct: the hi hat is too harsh. Neuro, I would recommend turning it down some, or equalizing it differently.

As for my hearing (way off topic): I don’t have any 20 kHz dog whistles, but using the hearing test at the local science museum, I can hear up to around 19.5 kHz. My sound card runs at 96 kHz, so it should be able to easily generate frequencies high enough to do a hearing test. Yesterday, I played a 20 kHz tone and turned up my receiver too high and...... suddenly, my receiver turned off. I turned it back on and it said I needed to check my speaker cables. I was pretty sure I blew my tweeters, but today I moved cables around and hooked everything back up the same way it was before, and everything seems fine, including the extreme high frequency response. So I don’t know what happened.

Undeterred by nearly destroying my equipment, I tried a hearing test again today (using sox to play sine waves), at lower volume this time, so that I wouldn’t break anything. I was able to hear to 19.5 kHz in my right ear, and 19.75 kHz in my left ear, putting my ear directly over the tweeter. I think I may have heard something at 20 kHz in my left ear, but I wasn’t sure. Also, my cat looked at me every time I played the 20 kHz sine wave. Just for the record, a 19 kHz tone sounds and feels like someone inserted a needle in my brain. I imagine I could hear a 20 kHz dog whistle if it were loud enough, but my stereo can’t play 20 kHz sine waves that loud.

[Malvineous]

If you're looking for a new media player I can recommend XMMS2. I use both the default command line interface and the Promoe X-Windows client, because it looks like Winamp. According to the list of clients there are a few ncurses ones too. And being client/server, you can run all these interfaces at the same time.

For an EQ, I've been using the mbeq plugin from the swh-plugins package as it's the only way I've been able to get an EQ working that handles 5.1 audio too. It's complicated though - you have to use ALSA, which pipes audio through the LADSPA interface, which loads the mbeq LADSPA plugin. But once you get it working it's pretty reliable. The only issues I have are with closed source apps (e.g. Flash) and 32-bit apps, since the plugin is 64-bit and won't load for a 32-bit app because of (IMHO) the poor design of ALSA.

Also FWIW the docs on my electronic dog whistle say the (tiny) ultrasonic transducer produces in excess of 100dB, so I'm not surprised you would have trouble reaching that level with the much larger size of a normal tweeter.