ELEK said:
"I really like games that the music seems to ebb and flow with the pacing. If there isn't a ton of action going on, there is little to no music....but if you are engaged in lots of action the music picks up a bit getting you into the groove. I liken it to a good movie soundtrack, if music was used more in games like it is in films it would really enhance the experience."

I'd say that's a lot like Metal Gear Solid 2. Dynamic music that beats quietly in the background durring periods of uneventful sneaking around; yet, when the Snake is discovered, or enters a serious/hazardous situation, the music changes to a more stimulating, alarmed beat. The gameplay and the music play hand in hand seamlessly. MGS2 I think is a credit to game music everywhere.

I also liked the old Return Fire game that would play different classical music tracks depending on whether you used the Tank, Armored Truck, Jeep, or Helicopter. It added to the personality of the vehicles and was pretty parallel with the way things moved and felt. 

God I loved that game 

If I ever get around to it. :) 

how many of you MAKE music and how much time do you spend on it? what programs do you use? have you ever released anything (on vinyl if you are a fanatic perhaps..)?

no, i'm not running a poll. just wanting to find out if i't something i ought to pursue. i'll let you know my answers to make it fair:

about 40 hours per song (can be more or less, depends more on production refinement rather than the actual melody)
reason 2, soundforge for fx, various sequencers (didnt buy those, a friend does it for me)
i'm rather clueless on copyright. what do you guys do if say oasis (cough!) stole your music from cube. yes you'd be proud but would you be able to sue them? 

refers to the sequencers. i can do a lot of programming on reason. otherwise it sounds like my friend does everything...lol! 

Try <a http://www.modplug.com>Modplug</a> and get their Tracker program - that's the sequencer proper.

This'll leave you with a file that you can play in <a http://www.winamp.com>WinAmp</a> 2.81 or later. Select the "Nullsoft Disk Writer" for output in Preferences.

Now you have a humungous WAV file (about 10MB/minute). <a http://www.cdex.n3.net>CDex</a> is just the thing for turning it into an MP3, OGG or whatever.

I have a bad case of the ol' CD burners, can you tell? 

for cdex, i was looking for it. i know modplug, i have listened to quite a lot of .mod and xm and so on. they are quite efficient.

i SOMETIMES use winamp to output mp3 to wav but it's not the best in quality (because it's a freeware product so what can i expect). soundforge is good because there is no loss in quality (i know mp3s are lower qual anyway...).

i have played my tunes in a club only to find that i can hear a hiss that i couldnt in my headphones or home sound system. so annoying!! 

uhm...

i used to use Modplug to make music, but i switched to FruityLoops ( http://www.fruityloops.com ) a year ago.
some would argue whether or not FL is good at all, but it does what i want it to do, and sounds nice to me.
although you must pay for it, it's relatively easy to get a ripped version of it somewhere...

the time it takes to make a song varies. if i'm very inspired, i'll whip something up in a few hours, and polish it off for twice that amount of time... some other stuff (like the song i'm doing for a map i plan to release sometime soon) take longer, as in, many, many hours to get it all sounding right.

and of course, there's the 'music' block similar to mapper's block. ;) so that can have an adverse effect on the time taken as well. 

try reNoise.com tracker 

as long as it doesn't stop me from hearing the sounds that can sometimes prove to be lifesavers.

Anyone's listened to the whole main theme of Tomb Raider 1? I think it's beautiful. 

well i got fruityloops and a friend of mine got a copy off me (i'm kind...since he still aint let me hear any of his tunes if he's made any).

havent used fruityloops enough to gauge it against reason. can you make jazz with FL. atm i'm working with reason orchester soundbanks with all the nice orchestral instruments. trouble is, there are lots of nice strings and gongs but trying to find a good saxophone is impossible. trumpets are ok but then you have to arrange them so they form chords (one in C one in bla and one in bla) or they sound shit...

ps anyone like the music from worms armageddon? 

well, FL is all software synths... not as versatile as hardware ones, but they get the job done. (and they're cheap).

getting a trumpet synthed in FL is possible, but difficult to get right. it's really more for electronic stuff, but if you've got enough samples, i suppose anything is possible in that sucker. 

Fallout 1/2 music is great. Sets the mood and makes the game even better (I just finished replaying fall2 once again) 

about synths. does anyone know how powerful softsynth is compared to hardware. i don't mean: yeah, sounds cool bla bla. just wondering if anyone has any knowledge of the coding. my dad knows quite a lot about hardware but when i ask him how close software gets to hardware emulation his knowledge runs out. i'm just curious, nothing more. i wonder if software will be able to overtake hardware with more powerful pcs. 

I have a friend who's a hardware synths freak (He must own more than a hundred) and he was really amazed by some soft synths sounds from Gernerator and even Buzz. So it mustn't be be too bad. 

I have a friend who's a hardware synths freak (He must own more than a hundred) and he was really amazed by some soft synths sounds from Gernerator and even Buzz. So it mustn't be be too bad. 

):o 

BUzz ? haha
It sounds so dirty and noisy
Generator/reactor ontoh has great pro quality sound 

i tried using buzz sometime last year. I'm not even much of an audiophile, and i still noticed a sort of dirty/noisy sound from it. Too bad, becuase it's kind of a nice program in some ways. 

and its sound (not all); unfortunately, the sequencer is a bitch to use; anyone can point me to a good free (or *cough* hacked) sequencer?

Generator is much better though.
And much more expensive. 

fat con was recommending it some posts ago. if you really wanted something cheap, and did all your sounds in wave, you could use danceejay. ok, ok, you can start laughing now...
sequencers are just drag n drop so basically all the same... 

renoise.com <- the best tracker. VST support and great quality sound. And it has FT2-like patterns!

The basic version is free, advanced is ~45$

I may sound like a sort of shill, but it is the best tracker I`v tried. It sounds better than fruityloops and IMHO even reason. 

 

I haven't tried a lot of other things but I definitely recommend ModPlug. It's straightforward, versatile and very windows-y (although still a little different since this music after all).

Since I got into this sequnced format to make music for Cube, any tracker that doesn't output in a compatible format is useless to me. Of the progs that talk classic MOD formats, ModPlug is the most modern I think (BTW, I couldn't run FastTracker on my PC because of DOS sound issues). You will have to take care of sample *recording* seperately, however, since that's not built in.

The episode I was talking about in #6 above is released, see News. The levels can almost be classified by the music associated with them.

To bring it back to games, one possible concern to those making downloadable stuff is filesize. I did miracles with the filesize for the music for my episode (over 14 minutes worth for about 1.3 meg!), but hit counts still indicate a good possibility some balked at a download when seeing the 2.4 MB download (huge for a Cube non-conversion set, 60% music). 

I downloaded it just for the music!