marathon ♫ tracks

[ChristTrekker]

Is there a resource that matches musical tracks to the levels they played on?

I downloaded the M1 QT2 tracks (thanks, Hopper! ) and am having a nice trip down memory lane right now. Not quite sure why the M4A zip is sooo much bigger than the MP3 zip though.

[Pfhorrest]

The Marathon Story Page has a list somewhere of what tracks play on what level.

[2Tie]

http://marathon.bungie.org/story/music.html should be it

[Hopper]

Yep, it's near the top of that page. The table just uses the numbers and not the names, but there's a number-to-name table further down, and those downloads should have both anyway. FYI, the Marathon scenario bundled with Aleph One uses those same QT2 tracks converted to Ogg Vorbis.

The bigger zip is lossless, and I guess it takes a lot of bits to faithfully reproduce all the noise and distortion in those instrument samples. Even silent parts produced some inaudible noise in the recording, which a lossless track has to faithfully encode and reproduce. I probably also missed some obvious conversion settings that could make them smaller without losing information; I don't know anything about ALAC and just used the defaults in the first tool I found.

[ChristTrekker]

The bigger zip is lossless, and I guess it takes a lot of bits to faithfully reproduce all the noise and distortion in those instrument samples. Even silent parts produced some inaudible noise in the recording, which a lossless track has to faithfully encode and reproduce. I probably also missed some obvious conversion settings that could make them smaller without losing information; I don't know anything about ALAC and just used the defaults in the first tool I found.

That explains it. I didn't realize M4A ≡ lossless.

Thanks again for all the info, guys. This community is fantastic!

[Hopper]

That explains it. I didn't realize M4A ≡ lossless.

Not all of them are, just these particular ones. Quoth Wikipedia: "M4A (audio only) is often compressed using AAC encoding (lossy), but can also be in Apple Lossless format."

For normal listening, feel free to stick with the MP3s, or convert the M4As yourself to your favorite format. Then stick the M4As in a drawer, and convert them again in ten years when your iFireDroid only plays audio in MPEG-7 (which steganographically encodes the sound into animated GIFs of lolcats, because those will never go out of style).