Slashdot Mirror
Kong in Concert - Donkey Kong Country Arrangements
Digital Coma writes "Kong in Concert, a project directed by myself and coordinated by familiar artists of the unofficial game music arrangement community, has been released at
http://dkcproject.ocremix.org and spotlighted at OverClocked ReMix. Its purpose is to pay respects to the excellent Donkey Kong Country SNES soundtrack and honor its composers with 22 rearrangements (or ReMixes) of every song from the game in high quality MP3 and OGG. We also have a BitTorrent distribution of the album's whole WAV compilation. If you like the idea of free, non-commercial videogame remixes, check us out."
Where's my banana-shaped lighter?? ("Freebird, I mean "FreeChimp"!!)
Did you have to pay any kind of lisencing fees to Nintendo? If so, how much did that cost?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Need some clarification, though; does this mean my band can do a cool cover version of the theme without worry?
I know this is probably a very simple question, but if you're taking someone else's work and remixing it, doesn't that mean you have some obligation to the original composer? What's to prevent Nintendo from sending in the lawyers to stop this?
Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is a bad idea or anything, (it's not my thing) but just wanted some clarification...
Umm... Minibosses are a rock band who play NES songs, gamingfm is a streaming site to hear game songs (or remixes).
The point is, stuff like this isn't remotely new or news. I'm guessing this is a buddy of someone on slashdot or VA, or they are paying for the advertisement.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I used to play this game nonstop. I remember a few weekends where I would lock myself in my room and play for 18 hours straight. Did the same thing with Super Mario RPG, DKC2, Super Mario 64 and Sonic Adventure.
It's been a while since I actually found a game that interested me. Most games nowadays are all graphics and little story, or if there is a story, it sucks.
I miss the old days.
Perhaps the /. community could support this project by having Cowboy Neal stand on a tall ledge and throw barrells at people.
...Now here's you're court summons. Have a nice day!
I had no idea other people thought the DKC music was good - I used to leave my SNES on, sit idle in various levels, and blast the music through the stereo with the TV off.
No joke.
If you like the idea of free, non-commercial videogame remixes, check us out.
That's the funniest thing I've heard all day!
This is one game that I believe had underrated music. I'll have to check this out when I get home. OCRemix has a streaming radio station at oc.ormgas.com, if you don't mind all the Final Fantasy and Sonic music they play.
Also, for Commodore/Atari ST fans, there's Nectarine Radio.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
This isn't the first time the Overclocked Remix guys have come together to make a tribute album for a Super Nintendo game. I highly recommend checking out Relics of the Chozo, which is their soundtrack tribute to the game Super Metroid. VERY good stuff, if I do say so myself.
Just my $.02...
Has to be one of my fave video game music tracks. In fact any game that bears even a remote resemblence to Mule has me "boink-a-dink-a"ing the soundtrack while I play. If you're familiar with the game, then the "boink-a-dink-a" comment won't sound quite as odd it would otherwise. Well, okay, it still sounds odd, but hey...
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
FYI: It's 1 re-arrangement of each of the 22 songs, not 22 of each song like I anticipated when I followed the link =P
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
(slightly offtopic, but...)
I have been searching high and low for two videos I saw in the past but do not posess. One is a video of a japanese guy doing the super mario soundtrack on a piano while blindfolded. The other is a different guy doing parts of the same soundtrack on an electric guitar.
If anyone has a bittorrent/direct link to these, I (and I bet many other slashdotters) would really like to lay my hands on them...
signatures are for fools with hands
"If you like the idea of free, non-commercial videogame remixes, check us out."
translates to:
"If you want to hear the one genre of music guaranteed not to get you laid, check us out."
stuff |
...P. Diddy Kong?
Try here: http://www.zophar.net/zsnes/spc/
Then go here for the Winamp SPC plugin: http://www.zophar.net/utilities/spc.html
I hate to be a wet blanket, and a redundant one at that, but unfortunately, this is a derivative work and as such the original owners can demand royalties.
The USA has a concept called "mandatory licensing" when it comes to music. This means for some uses, such as using clips from many pieces in a compilation work or playing a song on the air, the owners cannot STOP you outright. However, they can demand payment.
There was a case in the '40s or '50s or maybe early '60s where an artist took clips from a bunch of other songs and made a compilation work. The rights-holders of the original works sued to block it. The new work's artist claimed free speech and claimed Congress could not create a copyright law that would infringe his right to be creative. The US Supreme Court basically said no, Congress could not create a law to STOP him from being creative, but that the original artists were entitled to compensation.
Source: Some radio program in the last year or two. I think I heard it on a public radio station but don't quote me on that.
The bottom line:
Assuming this is still the law, Nintendo may come after you, but if you've got the money to pay them off you can make them go away and keep distributing your creative work.
Nintendo may be able to prevent you from distributing in or to certain other countries, I don't know the law worldwide.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Did anyone else read this as country arrangements of donkey kong songs?
I've got friends in low places... and they throw barrels at plumbers...
The Commodore 64 remix scene is very active, in fact there was a live C64 remix concert in London, UK last Saturday (Sept 11th), and a fantastic event it was too.
It was organised by a guy called Chris Abbott, and his company C64Audio.com now represents many of original 1980's C64 musicians and licenses their music. To date he's paid over £20,000 in royalites to the original musicians.
So the C64 scene shows you can have a vibrant remix community, whilst giving credit to the original composers and paying them royalties.
We all heard of googles text ads, but since when are slashdot posts advertisments for your own personal website?
He made the music for DKC and DKC2... some of the best stuff to ever come out of a SNES, _ever_.
I'm surprised he hasn't released any solo CDs, because he's awesome.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
People with way too much time on their hands.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
For more information about what copyright law calls compulsory licensing of musical works for mechanical reproduction, go look up "mechanical licensing" or "Harry Fox Agency" on Google. It costs about 8.5 cents per song per copy.
under australian copyright law afaik, this is legal as long as a maximum of 10% of the original work is used, anything more and they'll owe rights.
For Project Majestic Mix, a fan-tribute album for Final Fantasy music (http://www.kfssstudios.com/), the people needed to get what is called a mechanical license, which is a royalty-based license when someone wants play rearranged/remixed versions of the original music.
Sure. 'Cause the RIAA feels the same way about P2P filesharing, I'm sure. I'll buy that piracy - real piracy - in Asia & Eastern Europe is cutting into their [hugely inflated] profit margin, but not P2P, remixes. etc.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Its ok to say that dk sound track made the game imersive/good/fun as it is, since the game stile and its history are simple as shigeru always does. Simple history, easy controls etc. Dk was not the first scrolling game released, but its noticeable wish to make the game play interesting as possible is what made it a huge succes.
Just kidding, I'm sure Apple's cost per song is more than 8.5 cents.
It would be very nice to know how much - or how little - of an iTunes purchase is going back to the record companies and to artists residuals, and how much goes to cover Apple's costs and profit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They have their own remix in the works and don't want the competition.
A *NICE* company would simply pay the freelance remixer to withdraw his work or better yet pay him to distribute his work commercially.
I doubt it will happen, but it would be sweet if Nintendo signed a contract with this guy letting him distribute his songs for free for non-commercial users, but have Nintendo sub-license the songs for commercial uses.
Even sweeter if Nintendo included the remix as a bonus item in a future game.
Not gonna happen, unless the former owners of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream take over Nintendo.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If you happen to be a C= fan, then check out http://remix.kwed.org/ for some great stuff.
There's also a webradio of this stuff: Slay Radio
Real life is overrated.
I downloaded all the tracks directly (BT was going very slow, and I'm impatient) and am listening to them right now. I'm impressed. Some of them don't sound like they were done on synths, they sound orchestrated.
Anyways, since all the tracks from the game are in this mix, why not hack or devise some way to be able to play the orginal game to this new music?
I've done some light ROM hacking before and I don't even know if this is possible, but I'm just saying, it would be cool to have the new music in the game. It would certainly add some new depth.
Yeah, I show this to all the biatches I bring to my crib. Turns them on like a house on fire. Respect!
It would be nice if they had made torrents for the mp3 and ogg files as well. I don't have any download the entire set as wav files, but downloading each song one-by-one is a pain. And now that it's been slashdotted, the mirrors are getting slow, too. I downloaded the first few before this was posted, but now they're really starting to crawl.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
If I recall correctly, the music store gets about a third of the sale price. The songwriter (who is not always the recording artist) and his publisher get the statutory 8.5 cents. The codec developer gets a few cents. The record label gets the rest and (allegedly pretends to) give some to the recording artist.
The one thing I found interesting about Donkey Kong Country's music is that a lot of the samples that were sound effects in the game were also music samples. These included the piano, which was the jingle when you got an extra life as well as the lead instrument in the first level. Another example I can think of is the heavy, metallic sounds in the industrial level music which also served as the sound the mine cart made when you landed back on the tracks.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Hey everyone, it's what Donkey Kong Country would've sounded like had it been released on the Sega CD!
Over the weekend I found a live recording of NIN playing The Legend of Zelda theme. If you are a fan, its well worth the download.
(WinMX, search for NIN, it'll show up)
Is it possible to get a torrent of the oggs?
-rev
Although I'm sure "Bloody Tears" from Castlevania II (and IV, Bloodlines, and Dracula X) has been remixed at least 22 times. At least five times by Konami themselves when you count the version in the Dracula Battle Perfect soundtrack.
Not that I'm against remixing this song...
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Dang, almost forgot, I believe Castlevania Adventure 3 for Gameboy had a version of that song (the one where you play as a chick).
here's my fav nintendo grouph tm
name: 8-bit
description: robots that rap to nintendo songs
http://www.ninjastarrecords.com/downloads.
The one thing I hate about oldschool video games is the music. After hours of playing it would stick in your head... and wouldn't go away.
After weekends of playing Super Mario Brothers 1, I'd be walking to the bus stop sideways, croutching to see if I can go down a manhole, and jumping up the steps of the bus.... with that damn tune in my head.
My principle at the time also looked like Bowser, so that didn't help at all.
--
Was my post Informative? Help me get an iPod, by signing up and completing an offer. Get a cool eBay credit card and help me out! I'm 1 referral away from my iPod.
They have mirrors for downloads, save ocremixes bandwidth! They've nearly caved in a couple of times already!
Since Nobuo Uematsu, composer of the Final Fantasy series' music, has his own band: http://www.square-enix-usa.com/uematsu/black_mages /index.html, does Squaresoft own the music he is playing?
NIN never did a Zelda cover. Look it up. Someone else just renamed their work to show it off. It's a common thing on P2P.
People on there also seem to think that Weird Al did every funny song ever, and System of a Down did a Zelda remix too(They didn't, the original's on OCR and has a statement from the band itself that it's not them)
Hell, Terra in Black has been credited to Madonna a few times on P2P networks. There's tons of other examples as well.
The music that played in the underwater levels was amazing. I would just go to that level, turn up the volume, and soak it in.
I can't think of a better music track in a video game than that one. Thoughts?
I can't believe you people, you call yourself nerds and dont' even have one nice thing to say about this. These people are releaseing some awsome music.Are you such slaves to the top 40 charts that you can't see that? I for one welcome our DJ Pretzel overlord.
Fantastic site, just way too much FF and Chrono crap (I dislike both series). I never relised they did full projects like this and thought they were just random people submitting...
:)
I don't see how this is front page news but good luck guys and good luck in the future projects. Cough do secret of mana or Donkey kong country 2 cough
I like muppets.
Whew, for a second I thought Donkey Kong was going to be singing Achey Brakey heart or something. What a relief.
Am I the only one who finds all these repetitive midi tracks annoying? Has anyone ever gotten a Grammy for a videogame soundtrack? Well I must admit most of them are better than the Britany Spears and clones music.
I love Castlevania remixes. Theres room in this world for an actually talented Goth band who'd mix doomsical classical with death metal. www.geocities.com/James_Sager_PA
God spoke to me.
For a group that might not stop short of killing someone over a GPL (C) violation, you are all applauding the illegial rip-off of commercially owned and (C) music.
Just because someone does not release a piece of software (Music is also "software') under a license you like, does not mean you can just pretend that they did!
You can not argue for the legitimacy of the GPL and then not condemn this act in the same breath!
...for not calling it Kong in Koncert.
As much as I appreciate the video game rearrangement/remix community's output, this doesn't seem like frontpage news since this isn't big news in any way. Cool yes, it would be nice to see on games.slashdot.org, but it doesn't really fit on the main page.
Since this is being distributed for free, and is derived from a dead console, do you really believe Nintendo would do anything other than bask in the love of their fanboys? The SNES music composers are probably beaming with pride that their babies are still being appreciated to this day.
Props to the original composers of this and many other games though. SNES Midi stuff has elicited more emotion from me then any of the crap from x-box or ps2 games. "Oh cool, another bad european techno song"
I think the whole copyright issue is the problem, not a lack of people remixing. I've remixed the Streets of Rage theme (Streets of Rage has a great soundtrack and wonderful example of what can be done with just a few channels of FM synthesis and one of PCM samples), and I know someone who's remixed the Bubble Bobble theme. If companies would state that this kind of thing is OK when it's not for profit, we'd all see a lot of old remixes for the first time as well as many new ones.
Now a live jazz band playing the Starlight Zone music from Sonic would be interesting...
or just look here:
If you are lazy: winrar packs 1070MB wav songs to 680MB, quite a bit more than 5-10%.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
http://members.optushome.com.au/dogg01/compresults wav.htm
(never wondered what "multimedia compression" in the rar option menue was about? Every good compressor knows the major filetypes and parses them correctly (ok, winzip NOT)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
So what if I do, If I don't think it's funny, just as long as it isn't derogatory joke about a certain group of people, then I just ignore it.
The problem is with society today is everyone must like the same movies, the same food, the same humour. Once someone comes along that likes something different, they are ridiculed, put down,called names, etc.
Let Me ask this of you, what kind of humour do you like?
I'm guessing this is a buddy of someone on slashdot or VA, or they are paying for the advertisement.
:)
well as one of the guys who worked on this project, I can tell you now, none of us know any of the slashdot editors.
I actually urged the project leader not to submit this story to slashdot -- because I've been here a while and I didn't feel this was slashdot material.
Looks like I was wrong! Maybe Hemos is a DKC fan
cheers.
First, thank you for these people for remixing Donkey Kong Country. DKC series had, in my opinion, the best music from the whole wide SNES world - completely stunning and beautiful stuff. (After DKCs, I didn't pay much attention to Rare's stuff, until I got Starfox Adventures. Good that Dave Wise kept rocking. =)
This is a very good series of remixes! Well inspired and very interesting.
Yet, this remix is rather complex. And by complex, I mean "heavily inspired" and "not quite like the original". Sometimes, the songs are barely recognizable. It's great stuff, yet, I'm more of a fan of stuff that is more recognizably close to the original. A good example of this kind of soundtrack would be Puffy's Last Ninja 2 tribute - extremely faithful to the original without being too close either.
If you're into piano arrangements, i would check out the artist kLuTz on OCRemix, he made (only) 4 remix, but its worth checking out.
Also, i recommend these piano/near-piano "mood"
Noir - FF7 - Jenova for Classical Piano
Freemind+Graylightning - Crono Trigger - Tears for a Girl
Other remixes worth listening:
Jeremy Robson - FF7 - Philharmonic suite Part 1
FFMusic Dj - FF7 - String Machine (Corel Prison Remix) -> Best Trance Song on OCRemix imo
cornflex - FF7 - Fantastico Mambo Techno Disco de Chocobo
Standby - FF8 - Desperados -> Electronica, 160BPM
Ben Lewis - Metroid - Brinstar Theme
Rayza - Sonic 1 - Green Hills (Euroclub '95 mix)
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
Excellent idea. Given enough time, I bet this guy would find a glitch in the game to do so. In fact, I think I spotted Cowboy Neal hiding in one of the photos.
I hate to be a wet blanket, and a redundant one at that, but unfortunately, this is a derivative work and as such the original owners can demand royalties.
Okay, suppose they get 100% of gross profits of $0?
ATTENTIN ALL /.ers NOOBING UP THE OCREMIX.ORG FORUMS!!!!
GET OUT!!!!!
OCremix has been here for years. everyone knows about it, its even been aired on tv. Please actually listen to some of the music from the site before posting your mindless garbage and judgment on the site.
Rather than work around a game, why not make collections based on the composers' works? Here are some names to think of: Yuzo Koshiro, Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo, and Richard Jacques.
Circumcision is child abuse.
a project directed by myself
You can't use "myself" as an object. It's "me!" People seem so adverse to using "me" as though they learned the childhood lesson of "it's always John and I" too well. It's certainly polite to list yourself last in a list of people, but you never use "myself" as an object.
"Give it to John or me."
"This was written by me."
"He or I will go outside."
Sorry to rant, but the non-standard use of "myself" is a huge pet peeve of mine!
Of course by saying anything, I realize my own post is open game now! Oh well, the price to pay...
BUT STAY OUT OF THE FORUMS!!! YOU HAVE ALREADY BEEN NOOBING THEM UP ENOUGH TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
At ocremix.org you will find over 1000 remixed videogame songs from hundreds of games. Every song submited goes to a judging panel to get on the site, so pretty much everything you find there is good. Im surprised all of you nerd noobs are just now finding out about this site.
Cool
Would be snesmusic.org.
Way better organized, and also featuring the best SPC player to date.