Game music (current): Midi vs digital audio

[Mfkzt]

I think the original poster was talking about redbook audio. Redbook was big with the 16-bit and 32-bit CD-ROM systems, but it's only used for licensed music (Gran Turismo, Jet Grind Radio, Tony Hawk, etc.) and cutscenes these days.

[Jeremy]

It depends on the game. Some games benefit from having digital audio, whereas some simply don't need it. Redbook audio does indeed rule though.

[Cheebs]

I think we've seen the end of redbook audio in games. Even at the end of the PS era, games started using some other form of digital audio. For example, put DDR in your CD player. Nothing. DDR most certainly uses digital audio, but it is not redbook. It's a shame. I loved my free OST's.

[Ex Ranza]

*has great memories of swapping out Ridge Racer with alternative music CD's*

[Cheebs]

Originally posted by MechDeus
If you're refering just to Steel Battallion's music, that's on purpose.

I don't mean the in-game radio music. I know that's supposed to sound tinny. I mean the millitary theme cutscene and menu music. It just throws low bitrate compression artifacts in my face.

Originally posted by Ex Ranza
*has great memories of swapping out Ridge Racer with alternative music CD's*

That was the other great part about redbook audio. Even if the game didn't let you swap like Ridge Racer, you could still rip the game onto your PC harddrive, replace the redbook audio with different songs of the exact same length (simple editing with free audio tools) and then burn the whole thing back to CDR for play on a modded console. Custom soundtracks in the 16 bit era.

Originally posted by dog$
Sr. Carter said most of it -

Anything, including lyrics, can be used in 'midi'. As long as a voice sample is provided to some extent on a midi instruction, it can be sliced and integrated in sequence to have any noise you want.

You can have a word triggered by midi, but every different word would have to be a different "instrument". If you didn't do it that way, you could have 1 instrument and every different note of that instrument would be a different word, then you could use the pitch bending feature to have the same word at different pitches in the song. Anybody know how they did it on Clayfighter for the SNES? I'm guessing that was digital audio of vocals only played over midi instruments.

[Aurora]

Toilet Kids has a great soundtrack.