New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

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Spikey
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

Post by Spikey »

I actually sent Marten the MIDI's for Colonel's Bequest, including all the missing music, and MT-32 reverb instructions, recently. The harp music/death music is definitely the most important, we all hear it many times!

I've also got fan Phantas 2 soundtracks, although like yours it probably misses the cutscene music. I posted a while back with some Phantas 2 high quality master files, not sure if it's still up.

Phantas 1 has been extracted a few times already, I think publically once or twice. I recently got the master MIDI for it, too.
rwtodd
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

Post by rwtodd »

Spikey wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 1:53 am I've also got fan Phantas 2 soundtracks, although like yours it probably misses the cutscene music. I posted a while back with some Phantas 2 high quality master files, not sure if it's still up.
Where would I look for things like that? On midimusicadventures I don't see it, and there are oggs at places like SierraChest, but the places I know to look didn't lead me to FLACs.

(Regarding the cutscenes, as far as I can tell they are mixed with the voices as part of the video, so I wasn't interested. In theory it would not be too hard to pull code out of scummvm and make a utility to pull the raw audio out, but I did not do that. That means the only significant song I couldn't easily extract clean was the outro/credits song "rage", and for that I just punted and recorded it off the computer's sound bus.)
Spikey wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 1:53 am Phantas 1 has been extracted a few times already, I think publically once or twice. I recently got the master MIDI for it, too.
Ok, I finished pulling out the MIDIs last night, but if you already have them that's cool. I've been assuming things I don't see on the site (or Marten's extensions to it) are missing, but now I'm realizing your collection is more complete than I thought. Is there anything you are missing?
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

Post by rwtodd »

Spikey wrote: Tue Oct 13, 2020 1:53 am I've also got fan Phantas 2 soundtracks, although like yours it probably misses the cutscene music.
Well since I claimed it shouldn't be hard to get the audio using scummvm code, I tried it today. In a debug-version of scummvm, I saw that it puts the cut-scenes through an AVI decoder, and -- very lucky, here -- it turns out ffmpeg could make FLACs of them (and mp4's for that matter) as-is! No code modification needed. So now I have almost 4 hours of cutscene audio in pristine form. Of course most of that is just footsteps, conversations, and audio stabs, but maybe there is "soundtrack"-type material in there. 5.duk is the end credits song I couldn't get before, so I know I'll keep that.

The cut-scenes are also higher-fidelity sound than the soundtrack files (which were mono 22050Hz). ffmpeg say they are: adpcm_ima_dk3 (b[0][0][0] / 0x0062), 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 266 kb/s.

edit: for me, the cut-scenes I added to my personal soundtrack were: 1, 4, 5, 860, 3240, 4640, 4981, 5006, 6230, 6611, 6922, 10350, and 10605. These -- subjectively -- had the most to add to the sonic palette while being almost completely speech-free. If anyone else tries it I hope I've saved you some time. A slightly longer set if you can stand a little dialog (and in the sex scenes, a bunch of panting) would be: 1, 4, 5, 860, 1630, 3240, 4640, 4981, 4950, 5005, 5006, 5007, 6230, 6240, 6530, 6580, 6611, 6922, 7960, 8215, 10010, 10350, 10500, 10520, 10605. (all these are from the *.DUK files).
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

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Where would I look for things like that? On midimusicadventures I don't see it, and there are oggs at places like SierraChest, but the places I know to look didn't lead me to FLACs.
You wouldn't, most of my private collection isn't available publically. I'll try to get some uploads soonish, though. There's 4 tracks for Phantas 2, including a HQ version of Rage.
The others are called "Opening Sequence", "Hecatomb", and something else, unless there's only 3 and I forgot.
Ok, I finished pulling out the MIDIs last night, but if you already have them that's cool. I've been assuming things I don't see on the site (or Marten's extensions to it) are missing, but now I'm realizing your collection is more complete than I thought. Is there anything you are missing?
Yeah, I actually run a different Sierra music website, it's not on there either though. I have been collecting Sierra music, MIDI and audio, for almost 20 years now, so I've acquired quite a bit.

Things I'm missing are just masters of digital audio games I haven't acquired yet, and a few master MIDI scores. I don't have much of the Phantas games because I never played them, and Phantas 2's masters were destroyed, save for the few I found via Mark Seibert, which is another story. Phantas 1 I can't remember if the cutscenes have music that's different to the MIDI, whether MIDI plays but digitally recorded in the cutscenes, or whether there's no audio.
Well since I claimed it shouldn't be hard to get the audio using scummvm code, I tried it today. In a debug-version of scummvm, I saw that it puts the cut-scenes through an AVI decoder, and -- very lucky, here -- it turns out ffmpeg could make FLACs of them (and mp4's for that matter) as-is! No code modification needed. So now I have almost 4 hours of cutscene audio in pristine form. Of course most of that is just footsteps, conversations, and audio stabs, but maybe there is "soundtrack"-type material in there. 5.duk is the end credits song I couldn't get before, so I know I'll keep that.

The cut-scenes are also higher-fidelity sound than the soundtrack files (which were mono 22050Hz). ffmpeg say they are: adpcm_ima_dk3 (b[0][0][0] / 0x0062), 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 266 kb/s.

edit: for me, the cut-scenes I added to my personal soundtrack were: 1, 4, 5, 860, 3240, 4640, 4981, 5006, 6230, 6611, 6922, 10350, and 10605. These -- subjectively -- had the most to add to the sonic palette while being almost completely speech-free. If anyone else tries it I hope I've saved you some time. A slightly longer set if you can stand a little dialog (and in the sex scenes, a bunch of panting) would be: 1, 4, 5, 860, 1630, 3240, 4640, 4981, 4950, 5005, 5006, 5007, 6230, 6240, 6530, 6580, 6611, 6922, 7960, 8215, 10010, 10350, 10500, 10520, 10605. (all these are from the *.DUK files).
Yeah, I actually found this out earlier this year! I think the post was on Facebook though. I had forgotten they were 44kHz though!

Thanks a LOT for the cutscene numbers, those could be very useful. Any longer than 30 seconds from the short set?
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

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There's only 3 as it turns out. There's also a track by Gary Spinrad from PQ SWAT 3 (I think?) and a track from the unreleased game, Athyr (available in longer form formerly on QS).

I can't remember what's in this ZIP, but it's what I sent to Gary. Should have PA2 at least.

http://www.sierramusiccentral.com/Misc/Spinrad.zip
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

Post by rwtodd »

Spikey wrote: Fri Oct 16, 2020 1:38 am Phantas 1 I can't remember if the cutscenes have music that's different to the MIDI, whether MIDI plays but digitally recorded in the cutscenes, or whether there's no audio.
I'll be replaying it soon, but from what I recall most of the longer cinematic scenes have their own digital audio, but it's ground that's pretty well covered by the MIDI score. Phantas1 leaned a lot on MIDI, which I'm grateful for now, since it can be rendered in way higher quality these days.
Spikey wrote: Fri Oct 16, 2020 1:38 am Thanks a LOT for the cutscene numbers, those could be very useful. Any longer than 30 seconds from the short set?
Well you won't care about #5 (truncated version of rage for credits) or most of #1 (the intro movie -- your version is superior but check out the last minute of this one as it's got material you are missing). That leaves #6230 (possessed network cables hallucination) and #5006 (curtis hugs his mom) as the top tier -- over 30 seconds and are different than anything else in the soundtrack. Then there's #4640 (Bob's bleeding belongings box), 29secs and depending on your definition of music you'll either think the dripping blood sounds are part of the piece or a disqualifying annoyance.

After that, if you aren't a fan of the game you may not care for the rest. #4 (title screen sound), #3240 (curtis finds the dress his mom made him wear) and #6922 (game director easter egg) are short but have different sounds than anywhere else on the soundtrack.

The rest are either short bits of atmosphere/sound-design that may recall bits of the game for fans (6611, 10350, 10605 all <20secs) and a couple longer scenes that didn't happen to have dialog: #860 (curtis hallucinates his hanging mom -- 21secs) and #4981 (curtis attacked by zombies -- 18secs).
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

Post by Spikey »

I'll be replaying it soon, but from what I recall most of the longer cinematic scenes have their own digital audio, but it's ground that's pretty well covered by the MIDI score. Phantas1 leaned a lot on MIDI, which I'm grateful for now, since it can be rendered in way higher quality these days.
As the leading collector of Sierra music and digital audio, I definitely echo that sentiment! The digital era is mostly lost, with a few things I've been able to preserve.

Thanks for the intro here and about P2.
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

Post by jaffa225man »

jaffa225man wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2020 5:09 pm
Marten wrote: Mon Aug 17, 2020 1:26 pm Anyone experienced with editing MIDI files who can either fix some things for me or teach me how to address it myself?

The easiest way for me to record soundtracks is to play the "Complete Soundtrack" versions. These sometimes have pieces included that Tom didn't provide separately. However, some of these recordings have a serious flaw in them - they unnecessarily override the master volume.

Here's a specific example. Let's say that I set the master volume of my MT-32 to 45%.
* When I play back cb_1.mid, the master volume stays at 45% throughout the piece.
* When I play back cbmt.mid, the master volume jumps back to 100% at multiple points... sometimes in the middle of a sequence! For example, there is a reset back to 100% in cbmt.mid about halfway through the track from cb_1.mid, occuring at the moment where (if you were playing the game) the dagger pounds into the desk for the game's title screen.

Edit I think I've found a simple solution.

While experimenting with MidiEditor, I noticed that while it shows SysEx data, it doesn't send it to the device. As long as I've pre-seeded my MT-32 with the necessary SysEx messages before I begin, I can use MidiEditor to play the MIDI file without having to edit it. All of the volume resets are omitted because they're in the SysEx messages.
That's a great find. I considered doing filtering of SysEx for that very soundtrack, but didn't want the possibility of cutting out any other in-sequence programming (not that I have proof of any, but I'm too lazy to check). Maybe someday I won't be able to ignore the urge to create a SysEx filtering mode for QMidiRoute (for GNU/Linux) that selects based on SysEx start byte patterns. Then it would be easy to just remove master volume messages. Multi-byte wrangling is not what QMidiRoute was designed for/around. My other changes have also had to hack that a bit, though.
You may have already noticed it, but in case that thread topic name, also, throws you off, I've finally updated qmidiroute to edit SysEx as for this use.

If you're using GNU/Linux, you can connect my latest patched qmidiroute (viewtopic.php?f=4&t=17790&p=18491#p18491) between your playback program's output and the MT-32 input to automatically edit every MASTER VOLUME message and avoid digital overflow errors (clicking). Since I translate volumes from 0-100 to volumes 0-48, you wouldn't want to use it with any of my cm-64-mt-32-master-volume lowering MIDI files, or playback will be further attenuated.

I'm sorry that this seems too late for your efforts here.
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

Post by Alderem »

Thanks! It may yet be useful.

I’m currently on pause for doing more recordings, super busy.
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Re: New lossless FLAC recordings of MIDI soundtracks

Post by jaffa225man »

You're welcome and I'm glad you may find a use. Yeah, recordings can take a lot of time and effort, so I understand life's juggled priorities.
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