Nase

Depends on your definition of 'okay'. If those are copyrighted samples from a workstation, it's not just a 'grey area' but simply illegal, i believe. And whatever the case, do you really believe this soundfont might've been done in a totally legal fashion? Who'd have the resources to do it? Now there are a lot more possible sources today, like e.g. those Creative Commons sample collections, but I think these haven't been around long enough. Plus you hear the hobbyist approach in them most of the time. Squidfont, however compromised the sample quality might be (even has a few screwed up loop points iirc), just sounds like it's derived from some professional source. If that wasn't the case and there was a generous donator who just wanted to offer a freeware orchestra to everyone (while owning the rights to it), I'm sure the internet would know about it. No one cares about you using it though. I doubt even the recording engineers/patch programmers of the original would give a shit about a soundfont rip that most likely doesn't hold a candle against the original product. But if the legality issue is that important to you, I'm afraid chances are you'll have to skip Squidfont.

I agree, might as well get sued for using the Amen Break.

I played it a lot with a buddy in elementary school. I think we got to the 30s back then. The thing is that the level codes are relatively useless because you need all those weapons and keys from the lower, easier levels for the harder ones that follow later. Isn't it cool when a game is so tough to beat that legends surround it? Reminds me of the last Pacman level. It's something you don't see often in today's games. It would even be cooler if the later game content would be totally fresh and not just slightly different versions of earlier levels, but no developer in his right mind would design something like that

little magical 8bit plugin demo: http://www.tindeck.com/audio/file/jkwj-ohnoes.mp3 My mp3 renders of chipunes in FL always end up sounding worse though, it's very audible. Not sure if it's a specific encoding thing or a general one (Maybe because of the sheer amount of higher frequencies?)

More like 20 or 30? If you want myriads of drumloops, I recommend dogsonacid.com. I haven't got any direct links right now, but they put up big sampled drumloop collections once in a while in the forums. More Breakbeat than House, but there should be enough stuff for you as well.

Crap. This tune's been spoiled forever for me. http://olremix.org/remixes/719

I think Anvil Studio saved your choice of instruments in the Midi in form of Midi CC commands, and the soundfont player of Reaper reads that. So you have to get rid of these commands that are at the start of the Midi. I don't know how this works in your host though. You might have to read up on automation in Reaper.

Man, I couldn't agree more. First and foremost, using a sequencer for the first time was just a load of fun. I can imagine though that it isn't when you open FL the first time and give up after 2 hours because it doesn't sound like your favorite Zircon remix or something. Thinking about it, I'm actually really happy I didn't really know shit about electronic music back then and didn't have anything to compare my stuff to on the harddrive. I was just constantly blown away by making bizarre melodies and programming weird synth patches without having the slightest clue about synthesis. And guess what, I still like most of my first tunes in terms of originality. Even though they can get pretty hideous So yeah, have fun. Lack of knowledge can be a blessing when you use that lack the right way

Exactly. When I discovered OCRemix and 'real' music apps in '04, I wanted to join that super exclusive club of OC Remixers soo badly, but at least I understood after a while that everything I produced with that mindset was utter crap. Maybe I'll actually submit something sooner or later now that I'm more relaxed about it...

Would be nice to hear an educated opinion on this. I've never connected my notebook with onboard sound to my speakers, so I haven't made a direct comparison, but I thought that the difference in actual sound quality was marginal unless we're talking about recording quality. Isn't it more about low latency? And as far I know, the audio interface is kind of what the Ozone is about. If you just needed a midi controller, the Oxygen would've saved you a hundred bucks or so.

I really like Magical 8Bit Plug. http://www.ymck.net/english/download/index.html No bells and whistles, just as simple as it should be. The fact that it's GUI-less also is a plus in FL, much faster to automate by right clicking. Using any simple synth works as well of course, but if you care about realism you'd have to reduce the sample rate of the oscillators.

Gah, I really want that VI.One thing. $ 99, that's like 70 Euros, which is insane. Almost a fifth of what it costs in German web shops at the moment. Btw, I got the 3 IK plugins for cheap through a group buy, and SS2 was the one I ended up deinstalling after some testing. The acoustic content really really shows its age, and while the synth stuff isn't all that bad, a good soft synth paired with either good presets or some knowledge about synth programming is the better way to go IMO. It just doesn't sound as good to me when an evolving pad type sound always evolves the exact same way, and pasting effects like filters on top of it just sounds like that, pasted on. Flexibility aside, it just doesn't sound nearly as fat as, say, Atmosphere. And that's the only justification I can think of for buying a synth rompler, that it sounds great out of the box. I've always liked Sampletank though. It doesn't have the highend supermultisampled stuff, but a lot of sounds with character.

I cried a little inside when I read a while ago that Matt Uelmen had left Blizzard. Don't feel like downloading iTunes just to hear this, I just hope it pays homage to the unique sound of the previous Diablo soundtracks and isn't another run of the mill bombast orchestra piece.

You don't sample bits of the OST with Snessor like from an emulator, you extract the exact .WAVs the composers used right from the ROM. It's more work but much more flexible as you have all the sound data the composer had right in your hand and can theoretically recreate all the instruments spot on. When you just sample something, the sample's attack might be lowered for example, and you'd have to sample the sound from several tunes where it's being used differently. I use Snessor with DosBox, a lot of people don't seem to have the patience to learn the few necessary commands to handle it, but it's not that hard if you read the helpme. There's a 'searching sensitivity' setup in Snessor, and if you turn the sensitivity up, it'll increase the amount of garbled sounds among the extracted ones, meaning that it interpreted something else in the ROM as .WAV data. But presumably it increases the chances of getting every .WAV that's in there, so I'd set that up reasonably high. One thing that could happen is that you disregard a game sample as a garbled one, something like a white noise sample or some river fx. Especially because the .WAVs usually come out at a much lower Hz rate than they're supposed to be at. Due to this there's a bit of guessing involved during first sighting, you won't always hear what's supposed to be a violin and what's the piano sound etc. Once you load them up in your sampler and play them at different speeds, you'll get a clearer picture of what's what. Then comes the looping if necessary, and the 440 Hz tuning. That's it basically. On another note, there are two things I'm aware of that make the SNES sound like the SNES, which is the sampling rate of 32 kHz and the FX Unit, typically doing reverb and chorus type stuff. I haven't bothered with either of them yet, which is why my attempts sound more HiFi. Don't know if I even wanna try doing 16 bit 'chip tunes', as I'd also have to limit the polyphony to 8 voices. For now just getting the most out of the sounds seems good enough, but it might be fun to sort of directly compete with SNES OSTs by having the same sonic quality

Nice to hear that you appreciate them. If you find a way to improve the sounds, like finding a better loop point for the flute, just do it and reupload the thing. Sometimes I didn't get it 100% and just used the blending feature to make it sound ok, but that often shows in the higher registers as you noticed. Also, these are most probably all samples that are used in SoM, so you should be able to create all SoM instruments with a little work. I wondered about the 12 string as well, and I'm sure it's a variant of the slap bass sound. I'll try emulating more SoM sounds as I go along, and creating new ones of course. If you feel like giving something back, you could try your hand at other ROMs. There's the tedious part of going through the ripped sounds, sorting out the garbled ones (the .wav detection of Snessor seems more guess based than 100% accurate) and renaming them. But when you're done with that, it starts getting fun. Exploring the basis of all those cool soundtracks brings a new level of appreciation to them for me. I've ripped a few other soundtracks, and there's so much to find in there. Some OSTs just do everything with a handful of sounds, like Turtles In Time, and some are really extensive. Earthbound uses over 200 samples, a drum loop and jazz phrases included. So if there's an OST you know well and you wanna get ahold of the sounds, go for it. I'm nearly finished with Secret of Evermore, btw.

That upload site looks great indeed, I've been looking for something like that. http://www.mediafire.com/?ah1vkqgu4ex Here you go, have fun. Tell me if you can spot the organ sound in the OST, I think it's an unused sound (unless it's been recycled in a very different way). Oh wait, I found it. It plays in 'A Curious Happening' at 0:30. For one second. Lol, the other samples are recycled in so many ways that this one seems downright decadent.

I did them in Kontakt 3, so if you can load .nki, yeah, why not. The only program I know that can convert sampler formats is too much of a hassle without a license.

I used a DOS app called Snessor to rip them from the rom. Most instrument samples in there are shorter than a second, so you have to create loop points in a sampler if you want a sustaining sound. It's interesting to see how basic the soundset really is. SoM just has one single piano sample, for example, but that one sounds good across several octaves. Oh, and the SquareSoft intro sound? Down-pitched seagulls

In this case the important question i think is what you actually do with the other parts. You could write new parts that still very much have the feel of the original track, not taking the track somewhere else. 'Taking the track somewhere else', some place interesting is probably a good way of doing it in general, and you don't have to necessarily change up everything for that. Then again, if you have an extremely original arrangement going on and just paste the original lead on top of it, it might not communicate well with the rest going on. So at that point I guess it's up to you to decide what feels right. There are remixes btw where I think, like, 'oh, he syncopated that note and did a pitch bend here to make it sound less close to the OST.' And it can sound pretty forced. In the end, my approach would be to just be making the remix you'd like to hear and then think about whether OCR would like to have it. You're not OCR's bitch or something

Heh, thanks, but these are really just tests to see how to use the sounds properly. What i'm having in mind with them are extensive medleys and/or possibly widely original songs with a bit of Hiroki Kikuta feel (i've heard Shnabubula do similar things). The 2nd tune plays in the flying Mana Fortress. Called 'Give Love it's rightful Time' in the OST. Idk, I can try a non-retro remix of 'Spirit of the Night' sometime, if you really like it that much it's a good tune for sure.

http://www.tindeck.com/audio/my/tmgj/Dancing-Night-Spirits http://www.tindeck.com/audio/my/nubm/Give-Love Relatively close to the originals, mainly exploring the sounds. Sampling the raw wavs was pretty educational for me, and the SoM drumset really kicks ass by any standards.

http://www.tindeck.com/audio/filestore/j/jhhl-tessinmix1.mp3 Made on GameBoy /w LSDj.

Hi Roe. Nice energy you got going here. My main criticism would be the EQing/emphasis on the mid frequencies. It becomes a little tiresome to listen to, atleast on headphones. I know it's tough with guitars, i'm not exactly better at it. The whole tune sounds a bit like there's a bandpass filter assigned to the master channel and I'm constantly waiting for the producer to open up the whole frequency spectrum for maximum effect. man, the bare groove at 2:33 is badass. sounds like modernized Streets Of Rage. In fact, the whole song does fit into the beat-em-up soundtrack genre, constantly delivering new high-octane parts that keep the energy going. Looking at it as a song with a beginning and an end, i find it's lacking really distinct sections, but it works nicely as a background tune.

nice to hear that you dig the sounds and transitions, Antipode. I find the bassline of shitfuck (it's not really a title, btw, i was just too lazy to upload it again for public showing ) a bit grating too, but i remember being really into it when i did it. My like for cliched sounds definitely shines through in this one, it sounds pretty rave-y, doesn't it? But I wanna work on contrasting that with more original sound design. Anyway, I think I've taken your comments the right way, statas. I've gotten better at accepting criticism over the years, used to be horrible at it I just agree that this could be a lot better. oh, little bonus track...warning, ultra-cheesy intro. http://www.tindeck.com/audio/filestore/n/nvzv-pill.mp3

thanks statas. i'll try to do something about the kick. probably not gonna change the synths in these tracks, but i realize that my synth programming is still rather plain often and i'm getting bored with it, so i'll work on that. hm, i kinda like the xylophone...i'm a sucker for idiotic changeups though it's the stuff after that i'm not really happy with. compared to the freakout at 2:07+ which i'm really fond of, the last minute doesn't really add much, now that i'm relistening. i think i actually wanted to take the tune to a totally stupid place with the xylophone and all and then lead back into the action, but it didn't really work out. Anyway, thanks again for the feedback. I use FL btw. Mainly WASP and samples/soundfonts in this case.