music for game/app dvelopers

[Guest agent.m]

the best trackers are madtracker, scale and renoise. scale and renoise can use vst plugins (for cubase) trust me when i say you need to practise a bit before you get used to it. I still use trackers to make my music after 12 years. And do it professionally for my record label invizible circle.

here are the links

http://www.madtracker.org/main.php

http://www.renoise.com/

http://skale.cjb.net

madtracker is the easiest to get use to but the other two are more powerful. there are other trackers that people use but they are probably in dos where these use windows ;)

[Guest midnight]

the problem isnt so much the trackers but the compatability with fmod, which supports xm, it, mod and s3m, which kind of narrows down the choice of trackers to use really. At the end of the day its whichever one you feel comfortable with. The musicians who do the music for our games use fasttracker and Impulse tracker. But if you feel happy with modplug tracker then use that ;)

[Guest drblow]

seems to have sparked off quite a debate!

[Guest agent.m]

the problem isnt so much the trackers but the compatability with fmod, which supports xm, it, mod and s3m, which kind of narrows down the choice of trackers to use really. At the end of the day its whichever one you feel comfortable with. The musicians who do the music for our games use fasttracker and Impulse tracker. But if you feel happy with modplug tracker then use that :)

good point about fmod! forgot about that ;)

[Guest midnight]

of course, you could get in touch with the makers of renoise and either ask for the source of the playback code(unlikely) or ask can they port to ce (and create the necessary dll's... more likely)

there is source for several playback formtats, so it should be possible to port over more players, especially as fmod aint the best out there for the likes of xm (bass by Ian Luck is much more accurate)

[Guest drblow]

just a request for some info from the developers -

music for games - how long do you want music to last? i.e. do u want a 30 sec clip? do u want a 10 sec clip which can be looped? do you want a 'suite' of different length clips to apply as you want? do you want extra sounds from the musical context to use in the game?

also, what would be the maximum file sizes for these (in .xm or .mod)

cheers!

[Guest midnight]

depends on what you are doing the music for

if its title screen music, then maybe 60 secs is enough, but for actual level music, the longer the better depending on the game (avarage for smartanoid is 3 mins)

and of course, looped music is always better.

as for filesize, as small as possible, i'd look for below 200k/tune if possible

[Guest drblow]

midnight-

when you say that loops are better, do you mean small loops (maybe 10 - 15 secs) which the developer can loop as many times as required?

And if so, would developers want a selection to choose from? like a suite of various parts based around a main theme?

[Guest midnight]

well, a full tune can be looped, with trackers you can make it so when it gets to the end of the song, instead of fading it out, just skip the track back to another part of the song so it is effectively looping the track, sounds a lot better in games cos the song never stops, has no pauses etc.

[Guest drblow]

Ok... and is it up to the music producer at the end of the day, to create loop points etc for various tracks as they want - or do the developers want overall control of how long a loop lasts, or where the loop points will return etc??

[Guest midnight]

erm, depends on the game, but usually up to the musician

very few games are timed in a way that music must last a specific length of time (except games that actually use music as part of the gameplay, like REZ for example)

[Guest drblow]

OK - thanks for all that!

Suppose it's time to stop waffling and make some tunes!!

[Guest drblow]

Can I get a witness!?!? :)

I have attatched a .xm file I'm working on. Just looking for some feedback about sound quality, volume level, track length & format, suitability etc - and obviously whether anybody thinks it's any good or not!! :roll:

I have tested it on my SPV with smartamp - and the sound quality is kind of hard to assess - I may be being too critical.. but I spent quite a while trying to make a good bass sound as a .xi instrument - and I can hear it good on the PC, but not really on the phone! :cry:

I know it's slightly over the recommended 200kb limit - but I used instruments I made myself from .wav files - it's quite difficult to make them small files. But if I get good feedback about the overall sound quality I can probably reduce the size of a few files enough to bring it under 200kb in total.

So, comments please!! (and try to spare my delicate feelings ... I'm an artiste you know :wink: !!)

Cheers.

Blow.

pod-xm.zip

[Guest STuFF]

sounds really good for me :)

(didn't test it on my SPV, I will do)

If you want to specifically target the SPV, you'll have to forget about sound quality (i know this is sad...)

For the moment (with current hardware) we have to replay the songs at a low quality, and mono (I do this, maybe sometimes it's possible to increase quality...)

Check in your song, if there is "big" sounds (44khz 16bits) and convert them in lower quality. The best, i think is to work on a "normal" version, then, convert all samples.

200ko is big i think. Or only for a "main" theme, but it should be long enough. Keep going, it rocks !

[Guest drblow]

Thanks alot m8! :) Glad the first comment was positive! 8)

I did do this wee track as a 'main theme' kind of idea - thats why I went for sound quality first over file size. I thought the tracks for gameplay could be made up of smaller loops, which would be smaller files?! :?:

I was also wondering if the game developer can add different tracks into different parts of the gameplay, at various intervals? If so then the sounds could be supplied as very small parts, which could be looped for a while, then replaced by the second loop (same track, same tempo etc just new section) and so on [know what I mean?? :?: ] - I just thought this would allow more diversity of the music e.g. when playing a level which may take a few minutes.

It is the sample files which make up the majority of the final total file size, so to have a range of different sounds available will result in bigger files - so if it could be done this way, then each part could have just a few samples (making them small files) but overall the music would be more interesting!?

I dunno if any of this is possible :shock: . It's probably just a load of auld muso nonsense, and if the game developers couldn't really give a toss about "really crisp snare sounds ..." and all that w**k - then please do tell me to shut up!! :twisted:

I know what you are saying about the conversion of files - most of these have been done at 44khz 16bit - that's why I was saying I could reduce 'em if the reactions to sound quality were good enough. So I'm sure that I can still do a bit of fiddling with the samples to make the track smaller.

Thanks for your feedback! Will post some more tunes when they are ready.

Cheers.