SFXB Forum

Well, I had a few hours to kill over the weekend and decided to pay some time to Star Fleet's musical tracks. I knew there was a great variety, but I never truly payed my full attention to the soundtrack before. There's a LOT of different music in there!I remembered that Crash Override used to have a few MIDI tracks on his web site from Star Fleet that, as I recall, he used in his game (forgive me, I haven't played it in a while and don't remember). Did you sequence those tracks yourself, Crash? If so, let me take a moment here to commend you on your work!Anyway, as I was saying, I figured I'd pay a little bit of a tribute to the work of Paul Bliss and try to digitize some of it into a reusable format. The easiest option, of course, is to create MIDI tracks which people could later import into their own software for remixing, improving, or whatnot. I have almost no experience with creating MIDI files like this, but I do understand the mechanics and used to edit existing MIDI files years ago (only simple things like changing instruments, panning, etc.). I have had a few years of piano and clarinet lessons and (at lest, I try to tell myself that I) have a pretty good ear for tonality. So, without further ado:History ForgottenLooking Back BrieflyTriumphant DeparturePanic ChaseFormidable AdversariesTension on the BridgeI've only made a few very short tracks (most of the musical interludes are fairly brief), but I hope to keep expanding this collection and (just as importantly) improve upon my sequencing skills.Do you recognize any of the tunes? Can you picture when you might hear them as Shiro, Barry, and Lee are flying around the galaxy?Enjoy!

Hey Brad nicely done. Do I recognise any? No I recognise the lot. Anyhow it wasn't me who sequenced that theme tune - I got it off this site incidentally. Turns out the guy that did it has a few files on vgmusic.com.Are you gonna do any of those upbeat battle tracks? - there's a really catchy one whenever the skull beats off any alliance fighters. and a second towards the end of the series before Orion kamikazes the X-Bomber. Those would be amazing.About the game though - give me another week and I should have something interesting to show you.

*checks SFXB gallery section*Well, paint me red and call me Dai-X! I don't know how I could have missed that!   Yeah, in the near future I'd like to try some of the faster, more upbeat tunes such as the battles and XB's launch theme. I figured it would be best to start with the simpler tunes above for practice and to work my way up to the bigger challenges a little later.

Yeah well theyre really good anyway. Do you have WinGroove? it's written by a Japanese guy and I dunno if it runs on a Mac but but it plays only MIDIs and does a really good job of them.http://www.cc.rim.or.jp/~hiroki/english/

On my computer, just about anything that can play an audio file can also play .mid and a host of other formats "for free". It's a feature of QuickTime and Mac OS X's CoreAudio architecture. Even the bare-bones QuickTime Player can play MIDIs and edit the instruments, but it's not quite as full-featured as that WinGroove app you have.To create these songs, I'm using a program called easy beat. After looking at a few other sequencers, I was amazed at how easy this program makes it. I'm actually not using my keyboard (piano) to record the notes, but am simply dragging them into place.Not only is this program a huge boon for usability's sake, it also makes for a nice nostalgia trip. Years ago, when I said I used to play with editing existing MIDI files, I used a program (by a Japanese developer, interestingly enough) called MIDIGraphy. At the time, it was the very pinnacle for ease of use and full-featuredness. Unfortunately, it's so old (released 11 years ago, last updated 5 years ago) that it won't play notes properly on today's systems.You can see there are some parallels there. Much of the drag-and-drop and "note drawing" features are practically identical.*smack* Yikes! I guess you can tell someone is a serious computer geek when he goes off on a historical tangent about the "ease of use" of old software.  

If you want to go really old school, I remember how people used to rave about the old Acorn Archimedes being superb for creating sheet music with proper notation. Back then it was about the only thing that could do it, not sure what the software was. A friend of mine was involved in co-writing a piece of software called Octamed for the Amiga which I believe was similar.Yes, lots of random stuff on SFXB! I think Shane was thinking about trying to extract some of the tunes at one point but of course it's tricky because there's often dialogue over the top of them.Hm, well Frak Me (been watching Battlestar Galactica, apologies!) I'd forgotten how many mp3s I put together back in 2002...! Although I've just now noticed one of the links isn't right. There should be a dai-x one in there and the link's wrong. Tsk. I'll see if I can sort that, assuming the file's actually lurking around somewhere...

I'd noticed the broken link too, Andy, but forgot to mention it in my sermon above. I also figured I could take advantage of your Sounds page (now that I'd rediscovered it) as a starting place for picking my next tracks.Your Dai-X Theme MP3 is in the same path, named simply daixtheme.mp3. Lucky guess? Well, it was a guess, but your directory is also wide open for browsing.

Heh. Well that just goes to show how much I'd forgotten about it doesn't it! Link duly fixed (what do you call that anyway? A mislink, if it does go somewhere?) and I'll plug up that directory, thanks.Anyway just listened to your midis - very nice. I imagine people might be hankering after ring tones of such things these days - does anyone know how that works? Will polyphonic phones do mp3s or does it have to be a different sort of format?

Have I mentioned before that I'm a little crazy and that I can be a determined little perfectionist?As if you didn't already know. It's 3 AM here in the States and I just couldn't sleep until I finished this ever-familiar track:Imperial Alliance ThemeI'm really proud of this (albeit short) number. The tempo on all of the other tracks is pretty darn close, but this one is perfect.  Just listen to this MP3 mix with my track on the left channel and the show's soundtrack on the right. One thing that's a real pain, though, is dissecting these chords. Individual notes are easy; two or three of them from the same instrument at the same time is hard, especially in these minor keys.Yeah, I'm crazy, but there's nothing wrong with that.

One more track for tonight, then I really must be doing my statistics homework:Meet the X-BomberThis one should be familiar from Episode 1.