Video Game Music Mixes

Matt Pollard writes: "A group of video game music fanatics and musicians have opened up a new website at VGMix.com. If you're like us, sometimes you can't get the snazzy tunes of today's video games out of your head. Also, if you're up for a bit of nostalgia, this is certainly the place to go to relive the days of youth when you hummed the Super Mario Bros. theme under your breath during class grade school."

Comments

Re:VG Mixes

[irony nazi]

I still hum Castlevania 1, 2, & 3 music every now and then.

I never cared for the SMB music after I watched the SMB television show and they ruined the music for me.

Megaman had some good music IIRC. When I was a kid, I would hook the VCR up to my games so that I could record the endings of them. I still have 3 VHS tapes somewhere with videogame endings on them. I was devestated when I had to tape over the cartoon Ducktales in order to get Megaman 2. I would also make cassettes of the video game music. I listened to rap and video game music.

Those were the days.

Best. Soundtrack. Ever.

[Lemmy Caution]

Grand Theft Auto London. Ska, mod pop, and DJ's from the swingin' 60's. Any game soundtrack that features the Upsetters wins, hands down. Sadly, not available at VGMix.com.

we did this at work

[oo7tushar]

At companies they play radio music while they put you on hold. No different at our place. In fact the way most companies do this is to hook a radio directly into the phone line (they have a connector and all). Sometimes they hide it away in some corner where very few people visit. That is exactly where they hid it at our place (in the server room).
So my buddy brought in his laptop and we hooked it right up to the phone line. For almost that entire day we were pumping out the Super Mario Brothers theme, some nice game remixes (like Speed Racer) and various other goodies. All good stuff that customers would like to listen to.
We got away with it and we plan on doing it again =)

MIDI doesn't suck; replace the soundfont

[yerricde]

I dunno, I'd rather hear an MP3 of someone playing actual music than listen to some dinky MIDI data running through a cheap wavetable chip or soundfont any day.

So you're saying MIDI doesn't suck; your soundfont sucks. So don't replace the MIDI. Replace the soundfont, or use the MOD family of formats (.mod, .s3m, .xm, .it) that are similar to MIDI but include the soundfont in the file, but because the instrument samples are repeated over and over, it still remains at least an order of magnitude smaller than 128 kbps MP3.

Try Inertia Player

[yerricde]

Will any of these remixes be availible for my PC speaker?

If you need to play MOD files on a PC with only the internal speaker, try Inertia Player for DOS. Turns out the PC speaker can play 1-bit waveforms using only the internal speaker; toggling that bit fast enough creates a sigma-delta DAC.

Re:Big launch

[Junta]

MIDI can sound really good and offer very nice compression, *if* you have a good soundfont.

http://www.personalcopy.com/ has some great ones, my personal favorite being a 56 MB soundfont which together with either timidity or an appropriate soundcard sounds fantastic. Still not possible to accurately reproduce exactly what the creator heard when he put the piece together (unless you are sure you use the same soundfont), but it still sounds great.

I can't believe noone has pulled out this quote...

[bquinn]

"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."

-- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989 (supposedly, see here for details)