Game Development Community

Creating Game Music

by Peter Riley Osborne · in Game Design and Creative Issues · 07/12/2001 (12:04 am) · 3 replies

I am a pretty decent guitar player, who is interested in creating music for games, but has no real way of producing it without spending a furtune. (A fortune in my case is over $700). Does anyone have any good ideas on a way to produce music at home? What are good audio programs?

I work pretty much PC only and my CPU is, well, poop. So if anyone has any cheap and non-system-crashing ways to produce music that would be cool. Also, if anyone needs guitar on anything, let me know. I happen to know a great guitarist. Oh, and if you want something silly or dumb, you can use me.
NextNext Thread
PrevPrevious Thread
More from Game Design and Creative Issues


Victor "Freon" Hall
#1
07/12/2001 (1:25 am)
I used to toy around with MIDI a lot. All you need is a MIDI tracking program, like Cakewalk. Personally I used the old Creative trackers that came in bundles with the SB Pro, and eventually newer versions with the AWE32/64 line. I think even Cakewalk is in the under $100 category. Also with MIDI, you can always output to a high quality WAV file using something like Timidity, which emulates super high quality 24mb sound banks for professional MIDI cards.

Another option would be a WAV tracker like Fruity Loops, which allows you to import any WAV, SND, etc. files and does all the stretching in software and produces a WAV output. (From there you could convert to MP3, etc) I've played with Fruity Loops myself a tiny bit--it has neat effects for your sample inputs and a 404 emulator, too. The evaluation version is free, the full is something like $99.

The last option is MOD. Unreal uses MOD files (as does Deus Ex), which are similar to sofware WAV tracking, but the files are decoded as played. File size is small, but you can't go to overboard on channels and effects before it bogs the CPU down. There are hoards of trackers out there, but you'll have to sift through them to find one you like. Many are DOS only. The last one I ever touched was Scream Trackers (S3M).

Picking up a cheap MIDI capable keyboard might be a good idea if you're into that. Many MIDI/mod/wav trackers will allow you to play the keyboard realtime right into the track. If all you would like to do is be able to track via keyboard, pretty much any MIDI keyboard would do. Just make sure your sound card has MIDI in.

Anyway, it can't hurt to start sifting through various shareware programs on tucows.com to see what you're looking for. Hope that gives you a few ideas.

Peter Riley Osborne
#2
08/06/2001 (1:12 pm)
Hey Thanks for the help! I will check those out as soon as I can! I will let you know if any work!

Paul Robertson
#3
08/06/2001 (4:52 pm)
What? No mention of Sonic Foundry's ACID Music and ACID Pro? It's another multi-track wav mixer, and is the one I use for my audio work. Lots of plug-in support and loads of options. Works well with lower-end CPUs as well, I first started using ACID Music on my old Pentium 166.