Stellar Frontier soundtrack re-imagined.

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

As I mentioned in another thread, I write music.  I feel that one of the most dated aspects of SF is it's old midi soundtrack... 

As a musician that's been teaching himself the ins and outs of the craft for the last four years, I've come a long way from toying with mere midis.

For this re-imagining of SF, I would like to put forward the suggestion to re-imagine the soundrack, bigger, bolder, in MP3 instead of midi. 

I even have some tracks I've been writing that are perfect for the role:
I present to you the album: Cosmic Concert (in progress) http://www.last.fm/music/Samurai+Penguin+Studios/Cosmic+Concert

And of course, a remix of the classic, memorable SF tracks...
http://www.sheezyart.com/view/1903888/

What do you guys think?


EDIT:

Incidently, Shodarkhorn had this to say about the SF track when I finished:

"Great composition and exquisite preformance backed up by a very moving score that really caught my attention early on and stuck with me from beginning to end. This was a fantastic with everything from the string work to the touching melody of the harp right to the bombastic heroic sounding percussion. The transitions were very smooth and professionally done, each instrument melded well with one another and sounded hybrid of the actual insturments used. The theme was very fitting and the atmosphere of this piece was enough to drag me off the planet into the space colonies of tomorrow and to the planets beyond that...very courageous and adventerous theme really had me pinned to my seat trying to anticipate where the track would lead me next on this wild ride of sound. I have to say this was one of your finest works and even if it was modled after a game on PC it still does not lack the luster of an original score written by hand.

Extrodinary composition and moving track makes this stand out and is a deffinate show of skill and the amount of patience you have in the creation of music.

Bravo

I give this track 5 stars out of 5 and two VERY enthuastic thumbs up.

INSTAFAVE!"

[NiteHawk]

I like them very much, they really go with a space theme. It would be awesome to include the remake you made of SF, then some extra mp3s, that you created there into the game for music.

Generally its pretty awesome, I enjoy them. Do you also do sounds as well?

[Harpor]

im listening to the soundtract now.
Very Good! TC has done it again.

[CloakedKiller]

Soundtrack is great!

Wouldn't be hard to convert SF from midi to mp3 at all, either.

[Sandtrooper]

I already converted the MIDIs to MP3, except some of the instruments sound terrible (some are good, some are plain dumb, blame this on the instrument choice on the converter that I used)...should I zip them up?

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

Do it.  I'll judge them.  I've been doing this kind of thing for years.

The thing I'll probably immediately notice is how well you tuned the panning, the gain, and the equalizers.  If you didn't do a job that meets at least proffessional standards, the worst that will happen is we'll just dump them.

@cloakedkiller.

Not hard true.   Making it sound good afterwords yes.

I had converted the SF midi to MP3 through reason prior to making this mix...  Let me just say that took four hours alone, and this bout to finish it up took another eight.  That's twelve hours for the track track conversion to make it sound proffessionally done.

Let me show you what my interface looks like...
Note this isn't SF the Track, but screencaps I took of one of my high quality songs... Ala Alba Adeat















I used two full mixer racks for this one. 24 sound channels using over a hundred devices and combinations. Don't think for a second this is 'easy'.

[CloakedKiller]

I also produce music... Mainly hip-hop instrumentals... I use Hypersonic 2 mainly, with an assortment of other VSTs in Reason...

I definitely know it's not necessarily easy to create music.

I was referring to the code... as in, it would be easy to code the game to use mp3 high quality music as opposed to midi garbage. I've already looked into a lot of it way back when I used to mod a bunch.

[ChillFactor]

Well I'm kinda rusty, but I used to produce my own house, tekhouse and breakbeat tracks on FL Studio... but this PC I have hasn't got much sound stuff...

PS: Reason! yummm...!!!

[Sandtrooper]

You'll really frown on this LOL...plus this was stupid thing I did a year ago.

This is teh site I used to convert the soundtrack

(Bit crappy, but some MIDIs I converted (not these) turned out good, some really bad).
(DL HERE)

And I'm obviously not going to compete with you, ATC...no chance in hell I'd survive. Your music is so darn good it'll pretty much be guaranteed to be the new soundtrack rather than these crappy ones the website converted.

ATC like BSSM!? w00t! I'm not alone anymore

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

Alright... I listened:

And here's my Verdict



That being said...  The site's output sounds like it simply took the midi and ran it through an old synth card and recorded the result.

[NiteHawk]

In general yeah you'd just need change the ingame coding for the midi to a mp3 player in game. I would probably also change the wavs to mp3s or something similar as well.

And do people seriously like the dinging noise every few seconds in game? I mean, seriously. I know it is part of your ship.. But it does however get annoying eventually, but that is just me. perhaps having it do its sensor search ding in a longer timespan may be better. or lowering the noise a bit on it.

ATC wins, since his is more start from scratch type instead of converting ;P Converting it always will lead to improper sounds because you can't actually pick the proper instruments and such. But even still, doing it yourself has benifits of changing it here and there, your own masterpiece Hey, someone should remake sf-music7.

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

Actually, Reason's sequencer supports Midi Import.

I simply import the tracks, and start assigning the notes to components, then I expand it and play around, tweaking, then I start extending the actual song, adding the correct openings and endings, little odds and ends, bells and whistles.  It's just that when I convert, I don't just convert it into matching instrument set X... I apply my skills to the fullest and tweak it.  If I have to, I duplicate notes, move bits from one instrument to another... If doing a tweak to a note set works, I do it.  In short.  This is Song X remixed, now how should it be expanded into a FULL piece?

[Sandtrooper]

My Verdict

Thank you, now I can throw out those MP3s in favour of yours 

[NiteHawk]

Ahh I see, neat ATC. Either way, then its nicer the general way you been doing it then, if you can import and edit, all the easier then if it comes out as awesome as the SF remix did.

[NiteHawk]

Cough, I tried to do it, I don't think there so great, you can judge however, was just bored and having some fun.

First one is sf-music3.mid, next ones sf-music7.mid... Both are remakes that is.

I couldn't figure out how to get another master mixer board, so I'm missing some notes on music7.mp3, I'm not sure But for a day of playing around its kind of decent, I guess. I suppose I'm just not that great at music. Only thing so far is moving around notes and editing the notes a tad.. Not a expert at all. Just for fun, I suppose, and I guess anythings better then midi. But hey, half a day of this. I guess my issue is it needs better instruments to sound better as well.

I'm sure you'll remember them if you played SF.

http://shardsofenigma.com/sf/sf-music3.mp3

http://shardsofenigma.com/sf/sf-music7.mp3