Amiga Game Soundtrack Library

[melomonster]

The Meloman AmiVibes Amiga sound library has been completed, i.e. I added all (well, almost all) soundtracks I wanted to add to it. There are both Amiga hits and soundtracks from lesser-known games. Most of the songs found here have been converted to mp3 format and a few of those songs that I could not convert I downloaded from zophar.net or downloads.khinsider.com. All files are named and tagged according to one format so that the whole set is a coherent whole.

The creation of this music library was made possible by:

- https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page - the main source of music from Amiga in the original format

- http://mirsoft.info - used mainly as a search engine, which usually directed me to exotica.org.uk

- http://wt.exotica.org.uk/ - a site created by people running exotica.org.uk, several interesting subpages for people looking for less popular songs from Amiga.

- http://amp.dascene.net/ - my alternative source of music from Amiga, although this source focuses on stage products.

- https://downloads.khinsider.com/ - a site that I used as the source of a playlist for many games, and in rare cases as the source of entire soundtracks.

- https://www.zophar.net/ - the same, but to a lesser extent, mainly playlists, from there at least one soundtrack is downloaded.

- http://eab.abime.net/index.php - English Amiga Board - a lot of support from people there, they helped me get music files from less popular Amiga games

- https://www.wykop.pl/tag/amiga/ - Polish news and content aggregator with a fairly active Amiga community

- https://www.ppa.pl/ - Polish site for owners and fans of the Amiga computer

- https://www.mobygames.com/ - contains a game encyclopedia with scans of game packaging that I used in ID3 tags

Programs I used:

- XMPlay 3.8.4 with the Delix plugin - despite the rather outdated appearance and slow pace of development, it is still my favorite player, not only for Amiga music. The program plays music modules quite well thanks to built-in options such as interpolation or surround effect. Combined with the Delix plugin that plays most of the exotic Amiga formats, it gives you an Amiga sound like no other program. XMPlay also has a built-in wav and mp3 recording program that I used intensively when creating this library (conversion to wav).

- Audacity - a pretty good sound editor that I used to check sound files, simple mixing, mute, sometimes using the stereo effect and in two cases (Indiana Jones and Last Crusade and Gobliins 2) using the stretching effect to match the music files to the tempo original.

- Deliplayer - the Swiss army knife of any Amiga music lover. Almost any Amiga format will open. I used it in several songs (for conversion to wav) that XMPlay couldn't handle.

- BZRPlayer - my last resort has helped me in several cases, such as the Dragon's Lair trailer. It also has the option of exporting to wav format, but unlike other programs it does it in real time (which means that having a song lasting 1 minute, exporting it would take 1 minute, while XMPlay and Deliplayer did it much faster)

- Abyssmedia ID3 Tag Editor 4.1.0.0 - a simple tag editor with the option of saving all tags as a template and adding the image to mp3.









The library has soundtracks from 223 games, the lion's share of them comes from the early 90s. The most creative composers are Allister Brimble, Richard Joseph and Martin Iveson

Creating this library, I listened to thousands of songs from various authors and began to notice their habits and styles. For example, compare the pieces of Allister Brimble Mortal Kombat - 3 -Battle Plan and Body Blows Galactic - 6 - Stage 4 - Gellorn 5

[ Show youtube player ]

[ Show youtube player ]

The author uses the same set of samples in both songs, maybe even the same file only with changed patterns. I don't think it is bad, I knew these songs before but I have never noticed similarities before (I didn't even know that Brimble wrote the music for Mortal). You can just see some shortcuts. Chris Hülsbeck created his own TFMX program which was definitely more advanced than other Amiga music creation programs. With his help, he created thrilling soundtracks in the genre of synthwave, synthpop, rock and derivatives, the most popular of which are Apidya and the Turrican trilogy. Richard Joseph moved more smoothly between genres creating both techno (Chaos Engine, Gods), pop, rock (Sensible Soccer, Sensible World of Soccer, Sensible Golf), reggae (Cannon Fodder) and even referring to classical music (Moonstone, Cadaver , Lure of the Temptress). Martin Iveson makes soundtracks that (at least in my opinion) are characterized by above average sample quality. I like to think that if his songs were to be released on a CD, they could be included there without mastering. Dave Lowe, like Chris Hülsbeck, created his own music format.

Among Polish composers, Adam Skorupa has great music for ABC Chemistry, Inferior and Za ?elazn? Bram?. In the music from the menu of this last game he used a drum sample from the song When the Leeve Breaks by Led Zeppelin. One of the better Polish composers is Piotr "XTD" Bendyk who definitely more often played demoscenie than as a composer of music for games, hence only one item of his authorship in our library - Kajko and Kokosz. In other Polish composers the form is different, in the mid-90s it became quite popular to "borrow" samples and songs (it was good practice among musicians to obtain samples on their own, unfortunately this was not always possible because it required having a sampler, synthesizer, microphones, instruments etc.). Games like Lost in Mine, Street Hassle or Vida-X used the arrangements of popular songs such as Felicita or Crockett's Theme.

As for the conversion process itself, the easiest way was to download * .mod music to mp3. Many Polish games from the mid-90s have music saved in this format and it is recognized by many modern players. The * .med format (music modules created in the OctaMED program) is slightly less known. Next up is * .abk which, as I understand it, is something similar to the mod file only used in Amos. Then there's a whole bunch of * .p4x (The Player 4.x), * .dw (David Whittaker), * .dl (Dave Lowe), * .mdat and * .smpl formats (Chris Hülsbeck format in which music and samples are stored in separate files), * .rjp and * smp (Richard Joseph format - similar mechanism). The hardest to convert were files in very rarely used * .mxp formats (Lost Dutchman Mine music is in this format, I could not play these files in any player so I just started the game, turned on the sound recording and recorded two songs that fly on the title screen), * .dum (music from Gobliins 2 with which I had to get a bit tired in Deliplayer and Audacity) or * .mxtx (A-Train and Dune 2, also a lot of work). The boss of all annoying formats is the Ken Lagace format used in Pirates! and M1 Tank Platoon - for the first one I did the same as for the Lost Dutchman Mine but I used the option in the game to play all the songs. I donated the M1 Tank Platoon. I would like to add to my library music from Prince of Persia but that it is a conversion from Apple II so the sound generation system is proprietary. So there is no other way to record this soundtrack than to record it from an Amiga or from an emulator. This one title track that is currently in the collection is a courtesy of jotd from the eab.abime.net forum.

The library is therefore not 100% complete or closed. You can find here almost all songs that I wanted to have in mp3 format but I don't mind adding more soundtracks assuming that they will be interesting. I will try to complete the collection as soon as I find a way to download the missing files. I still have an idea to similarly collect Amiga demoscene music (or at least the one from the 90s) but it may be sometime ... And in the meantime I invite you to download:

Folder with individual soundtracks: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/f...kOY2m0IsCgS9Vn


The entire library in one archive (big ass file, 8GB):https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rR6...SlPZEqWd7/view



PS. This whole post was translated to english using google translator so sorry for any errors. Original text in polish I posted here: https://www.wykop.pl/ramka/5466363/b...zyki-amigowej/

[djukon]

Thank you so much for sharing, melomonster.