Royalty Free Music!

Everyone! I have a new website, with a nice handfull of Royalty-Free Music for your games made by Yours Truly!! You can post comments on the songs there, etc. Let me know what you think!

check it out at http://www.mattmcfarland.com

downloaded and archived for future release, thanx man, some nice tunes there.

Nice stuff - very generous of you.

Thankyou. :o)

well, the site worked last night, but now it is going back to omnis.com (grrrr)

I think it might just be at my work computer, not sure.

At any rate, thanks for checkin me out!

website works for me right now.

Nice little library you got there. I also did a whole bunch of royalty free music, and if you want any inspiration or something, then feel free to check http://www.noenemies.com/media.php?cat=Music

do you have anything that might go well with a naval epic... a submarine game, that is :)

something that brings out the turbulent seas... stuff like that...

--Mike

speaking of which, what do you think is the best sub music? das boot, red october or crimson tide?

Red Ocktober: Red you need classical, something baroque.

StevieC: I don't wanna seem rude but some of your music uh seems out of time, the jammy ones especially (why don't you quantise?), but thanks anyway for the link. I've gotta admit when I saw you said most tracks took under an hour I thought hmm, mine take around 6 hours for 3-4 minutes of music.

Everything on my page with the exception of one specific song (see if you can guess, it took 8 hours) took under an hour!! :)

I can pump some tunes out for people but since I'm so busy with life and my game itself, I would need someone to actually want to pay me and I know that most likely wont happen and I dont mind it because like I said, I'm busy with my upcoming shooter!! :)

probably just takes me ages cos I'm using a tracker.

i like the musical themes from Crimson Tide better than Das Boot CS... more depth to it...

yeah, something like the music from that King Arthur movie... with a lil Japanese pipes ( i dunno what they're called) would fit a pacific sub game...

--Mike

*buzz*, wrong answer :P

tracking = fast, it's what I call 'nonlinear composing', as opposed to linear composing with conventional midi-apps. Nonlinear composing offers more flexibility and better overview, it's far batter for large-scale music like orchestral pieces where there are over 20 different sections all playing their own thing.

maybe I'm just perfectionist then, but I've heard other trackers who make really decent mods speeding hours and hours on them, take Jeroen Tel for example.

oh sure... things take time, but I'm very sure that a tracker works always faster than doing the same tune in a non-tracker. Or: in the same time, the tracked song underwent more changing/polishing.. just because that all is so easy to do.

I know you're a musician but have you used a tracker a lot for complex tunes, I have for uh 16 years and it's actually hard to make something sound decent and change/polish it. For example reverb/echo, no you can't just apply it to a channel you have to manually programm it over multiple channels. Panning/volume changes easy? No, program it on each note, poss. over multi-channels. Pitch bends easy, uh no etc. Do you get the picture? :-)

no :P

Can your mailbox receive 3.7mb or does it blow then ?

wha? My mailbox can receive LARGE why?

Matt : excellent music :) - would you mind if I used Breakthru and Kickit for the menu and in-game music for Stunt Race Xtreme?

Matt - thanks a lot! Some very nice music there! And Royalty free music is real rare.

Feel free to use the music, as long as you give me credit!

grey: received email?

yup, was asleep when you sent it probably (or watching columbo). I've replied, but basically excellent track very impressive. Must have been hard in a tracker as trackers are more suited to Modular music like Rave/Trance imho, to do a classical style piece must have been a beeach.

Not at all... notes are just notes.. I've been doing this since IT2 came out, by then I was already an avid ST3 user. I've completed a full musictech. study with it, I've done movies with it, TV, commercials, theathre .. and it's just blazingly fast. I couldn't ever have done it (as fast) without a tracker. But then again, it differs from person to person, I always use those terms linear- and nonlinear-composing for this issue.
Nonlinear meaning something like tracking, 808/909/303-interface, notes, every way where you put events on a place.
And linear meaning something like playing with a metronome from A to B. So, composing 'realtime' without the possiblity to feedback/reconsider what you just played a second ago. Ofcourse, ppl can go into microscope editors, key editors, pianorolls etc. to soup-up their played notes, but then they're essentially editing nonlinear ..
Question is which interface works faster for nonlinear composing/editing: a tracker with all its hotkeys or the typical micro/key/roll editors in apps like cubase. I know the answer for myself. :P

I've used Impulse Tracker, Scream Tracker 3, etc, and I've always thought trackers with "hot keys" were clunky and annoying.

I'm sorry, but with Fruity Loops you can combine patterns together, and you can't do that with a tracker unless you copy paste and move channels around and I always found that method annoying.

If you had say Pattern 8 and pattern 6 and you wanted to put them together, it would be nice to just put 8,6 down in the playlist but you can't. Instead you have to take the notes from 6, and 8, and paste them into pattern 9.

If you make a nice beat by itself at pattern 1, then in pattern 2 it has to have pattern 1 copy pasted into it along with your addtion. The same thing applies throughout the song, but then if you want to make changes its more key pressing and copy pasting.

That's actually extra work if you think about it. The synth samples and filters and mixing that come with the latest trackers are also not near as good as using real synths and real filters that come with fruity loops.

My synopsis is that trackers are complete and total crap and you need to get with the times. ;) It's the 21st century dude! Ok, but I do have a friend who made some really good music with a music program that works just like a tracker (froget what its called) - but if you are using those crappy 8 bit wav samples and mod plug, your music will always sound like it should be in a '92 amiga game or something.

I also have always disliked the "Tracker community" as they have been so arrogant about their "tracks" and also their "samples" - The whole "That's my grand piano sample!" type arguments that littered tracker forums was a big turnoff for me. Atleast FL comes with everything and even sythns to make new samples that blow half the crap that those arrogant fools acted so proud of anyway.

CS: Well I haven't used music programs like cubase much but I know that my tracks take a long time that's all :-)

Matt: that pattern/channel-repeat issue will be taken care of with the tracker I'm lead-designer of, together with a company.
Repeats might not always apply on varied orchestral music, I usually shove-in enough variations so that a full-repeat isn't possible anyway, but that's all personal ofcourse..
Do notice that trackers like ST3/IT/FT are classic trackers, there's not really a fully modern tracker around that doesn't purely focus on dance/trance etc. Maybe too generizing, but I haven't ever seen anything tracker'ish that can be seriously used for orchestral/casual music, that doesn't offer arcane screenlayouts (gfx-designers at work for THEIR rep. only!) and little keystrokes.
That's gonna change however. ^_^

Luckily then I use such industry-standard-libraries as VSL, Eastwest, Miroslav eh :P FYI, I'm completely NOT like those classic tracker-users with their stereotype music, ideas, samples etc.

CS_TBL. This new things sounds cool, just make sure it get's finished OK!! I can't use Fast TRacker 2 anymore on my XP machine and it pees me, I have MadTRacker but it's unregistered so missing feaures (like instrument volume and pitch/tone shift!) unless they aren't in the registered version. btw, I am a sterotypical tracker lol, listen to the music on my games to see.

I've no problem with stereotypical tracker-users.. I do have a problem when stereotypical tracker-users define the stereotypical image of the concept 'tracker'.

Step outside what you already know about trackers and try to compare a pattern with writing notes on paper. It's more or less the same way of thinking: you think of a location and you put a note or event there.

Is writing music with pen/paper outdated compared to modern apps? Filmcomposers like James Horner (Titanic, Bravehaert etc.) still work like this on a daily base.

I totally agree with the pen/paper in comparison to trackers.
I also think you may be correct when it comes to composing film style music on a tracker could be easier, because those songs are more linear and do not have repeat much of anything!

All in all, they both have their place, and like I said I've heard some great music before that was made with trackers.. Sorry if I sounded harsh about the "tracker community"! I think its because I heard too many crappy IT files and browsed forums when people were having a bad day over "sample ripping"

The stereotypical tracker-users of yesteryear defined the image of tracking.. that's true unfortunately. And some of those composers did a nice job, but looking back on it from today's perspective.. it does sound outdated ofcourse. That's because of 4 things: the generation that grew-up with trackers was more into dance/trance/electronica, secondly: conventoinal instruments ppl sampled usually came from keyboards (which sounded quite crap back then) or silent parts from CD's, thirdly: it was the time of dial-up modems.. tunes weren't meant to be too big.. a few hundred kb orso.. but certainly not up to 64MB orso, and fourthly: tracking was easy to do, you didn't need any studio-equipment, so a lot of tracking-tunes were made worldwide.. a lot by ppl with little musical background.

But it was so easy to blame the concept of tracking for all that :P

It's comparible to BASIC btw.. I think we can honestly say that the built-in basics from the old 80's homecomputers sucked eggs.. with their gotos, non-local variables, non-procedural stuff and crappy/limited editors.
In a way Blitzbasic could suffer from that. But does it make blitz bad, just because it's based on basic?

Someone could take the principals of a tracker (which is the list and pressing letters, etc) and really refine it to use the power of today's computing, and speed the process of fading and all that up too. Another problem with trackers is that fading and panning was always a pain. You would have to type things over and over again. like f90 then f95 then f80, and so on. So if you could take the great part of tracking, which is that you can place notes in order with ease, and add it to the multi-threading and mouse dragging of today, then I would buy it for $100.00 if not more.

hotkeys are great and all, but still explain to me how key pressing is faster then mouse dragging? Manipulating sound as a whole is faster with the mouse! Unless you create hotkeys to do so, but I failed to see any hotkey or fast way to do panning or fading.

Tell me how "sound envelopes" would be fast with keys?

Tell me how instrument emulation works if you're using only WAV samples?

If you added instrument emulation, so each time you play the song the sounds are more realistic, then certainly it is a powerful tracker.

We (me & rest of the team) do that!



??
In IT2: select a block, make sure that (in case of volume) there's a start-value at the start of the block, an end-value at the end of the block, and press ALT-K

Likewise for the effect column, but then ALT-X

Worked like that in ST3 as well iirc..

There's only 1 pitfall to this: the interpolation is limited to the row-density and value-range. In what we're designing I've issued this.



explain me what you want to drag around with the mouse.


You also press the rocket-button to run blitz-code? Or do you press [F5] ? :P

/me flabbergasted! O_O



This might be true for some sounds. I think you'd like our intentions to support external controllers if you want to tweak your sounds. :P
Other than that, conventional instruments need little or no sound-editing. Typically that makes them sound only worse.
And ofcourse, we'll have mouse-support for our instrument-screen.



You do refer to things that don't often happen. Typically you create an instrument once, and spend most of the time with notes. There's always a little bit of tweaking with the instruments, but generally I -personally- spent 99% of the time with the patterns, not the instrument.

Are you referring to physical modelling or what?



uh, you mean like emulated 'practice'? Like when you're playing in a band? 100th time you playback it sounds perfect, and the first time it sounds crap? :P

It would be possible in our concept btw, but uhm.. I don't see the point here :P

First: Didnt know about the ALT-X, man I would have saved a ton of time back in the 90s wouldnt I?


Ok, let me explain mouse dragging and sound envelopes a little better. I was not referring to the instruments!

Ok, mouse dragging! It would be nice to select with the mouse X many notes and then right click and then left click on "Fade" or any other effect. also, if selecting all the text and simply dragging the mouse over, for the mouse cursor to show the typical windows drag image, then moving whatever from one channel to another.

Ok, Sound Envelopes.

Ever play with ACiD or Fruity loops? Sound envelopes effect a whole pattern, or the whole song, or a time frame from 0:34 to 1:08 (or whatever)

Then with the sound envelope you add points that make up a horizontal line that goes across the selected area.

You double click to add a point, right click it to remove it. Move the point up and down or left and right, then you can visually see how opaque you want the effect to be.

So if you want to add panning, way up is left, way down is right. If you want to add an effect (out of thousands) high intensity is up, low intensity is down, etc.

Sound envelopes are easy to use and make it easy for the mind to visualize just how each effect is working.

ah, ok.. we have that :P

We call it mapping, you can choose what each cell looks: like numvalues 0..64, 0..255, 0..1000 etc., but also 'curve' .. in this case this 'curve' is your envelope.
btw, tracks can be customised to your needs. Need 15 cells instead of 4? Do it!

Instrument emulation has a HUGE point. I might be using the wrong words for it. FL comes with a Guitar emulator, so you can really WORK it and when you play the song the guitar strings sound really strummed etc, once you make it a mp3 though it sounds like a finally recorded song. Also styrus,and many more instruments, it also makes midi files too ..

That's all a matter of instrument-design, which we offer in an extensive way (modular).
In any case, surely we support midi-out as well, so you could control any third-party synth in the background. Tho I'm sure that our instrument-editor is flexible enough to cover all those. Unless that guitar-thing from FL does physical modelling, it's just a sample-player. Strumming is a matter of triggering the right samples/notes at the right moment. All that is a matter of instrument-design.

Hmm well I think you're really making something good, so definately email me when you have a demo available! I'd love to really like to give you feedback on it!

When we've something to show, I'll surely make a forumpost about it... (if it's not considered offtopic ofcourse :P)

Sounds good :)

It can't be off-topic if its computer music.

Check this out: http://www.buzzmachines.com/

It appears to be a free Tracker with loads of Generators.

buzz is great stuff, you can create some great sounds and the way it organises its patterns is damned good.

Another alternative is Psycle which is damned good too. There are also the Renoise and Skale trackers out there which are worth looking at.

The good thing about trackers, IT, XM, and the like, is more to do with the type of music you can write with them. There are some real classics out there, and I believe that thinking of them as "sub standard" to modern music programs just becuase they dont particular features is a waste of time.

We wouldnt have Necros, Siren, PurpleMotion, Skaven and Elwood modules if it wasnt for trackers, and I woudlnt give that up for all the vst's in the world.

This kinda reminds me of the late 90's where it was an contest between XM people and IT people ^_^

Personally I think its all down to preference. Tracked tunes can sound just as good as anything made in reason or fruity loops or whatever. If you're deciding what to use, use whichever produces the sound you're looking for. Most of the time its down to ability and creativity anyway.

oh, and if you've ever entered an One Hour Compo on esper.net before you'd know how good hot keys are in trackers ;)