How Super Nintendo Music was made.

Video Games
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I saw this on Nintendolife but I am not sure if anyone else might be interested in this.

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This is awesome. I love this sort of thing.

I’m sure you’ve all seen it, but if not, this is the greatest documentary on videogame music ever made IMO.

http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2014/10/diggin-in-the-carts-series

YouTube…

There are six episodes.

–Dave

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Very interested. When I first learned about MIDI synthesizers, I looked into the SNES and how it uses samples. But I couldn’t fully wrap my head around it. For instance, why didn’t it sound a lot better if it used audio samples? Eventually found out it uses tiny low-fidelity samples.

Think I asked someone in the old forum if there were higher quality samples stored on the cart… perhaps silly in retrospect but I was thinking of how something similar was discovered with GBA audio in the cart, before the GBA hardware degrades it to hell. Or if a game’s music tracks (or really the original samples) existed in uncompressed high quality somewhere? Answer I recall was yes, assuming the dev kept those source audio files and didn’t discard/lose everything.

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Recently there’s been someone recreated the DKC soundtrack using the original uncompressed samples… It sounds amazing, even with Youtube Compresson:

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I saw this video but I was unimpressed. Right from the start it misattributes music to Mario World and Castlevania IV with All Stars and Dracula X music and video playing? He also says the 64KB ram was for music for the whole game, but it’s just for one track.

If you get stuff that basic wrong, how can I trust the actual technical stuff?

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Now I’d love a MSU1 of this. Sounds so good.

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Great video. It’s incredible the amount of dedication and technique that’s involved to push the sound capabilities of old consoles. I’d love to see one on Genesis sometime.

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You can see some great info on Genesis music in “The Cool Kid” episode of Diggin’ in the Carts. They show some shots of Yuzo Koshiro on a PC of the time. I’ve read elsewhere that he still has the disks and whatnot from when he wrote the Streets of Rage stuff. It’s fascinating.

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There’s a way to rip the music instructions and play them on winamp. I remember the collection of the whole snes library being ripped and put on a file sharing site before. I don’t want to advocate pirating the music but I wanted to point out that the file size of it all is miniscule because it’s just instructions instead of a music file like an mp3. The combination of having instructions and a good sound chip meant games could still play amazing tunes on older systems like the snes/new.

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I really hope he digs down into these if he gets hired for the SOR4 project.

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I’m not sure about this.

I think he’s very high level about it all, and misattributes a few things when it comes to describing how difficult and time consuming this was.

Tracking music came as second nature to videogame musicians back then, especially those in Europe.

I guess I’d like people who make videos like this to cite their references.

The video has great presentation but the voice-over is not accurate. It’s like he’s taken a paragraph from each of these articles and extrapolated, but not got it checked by anybody else.

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Interesting. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were some embellishments in the video.