I attached the original MIDI files if you want to have a go.
Cool, thanks!
It might take a bit of work to get them sounding good, as I don't have the original sound samples anymore (not that Roland drum samples are in short supply).
Yeah, it’ll be a learning process, but it’s something I’ve long wanted to learn anyway.
Also, at some point I transferred the MOVs that contained the samples to a non-Mac disk, so those weird Macintosh file resource forks got removed. Unfortunately, those contained the sound samples and other critical stuff. You wouldn't happen to have the original music MOV files, would you?
I don’t have them, but I can get them. There’s an app for MacOS Classic called the Marathon Music Exploder that can split a MacOS Classic
Marathon 1 music file, like
Trojan’s, into its constituent .mov files. In this case, it’d split
Trojan’s music file into 21 component .mov files. However, I know from experience that it’s necessary to go to “Get Info” and increase its memory size to get it to extract all 21 tracks – if memory serves, the samples in “Dance the Last Waltz” cause it to run out of memory with its default allocation. I might give this a whirl myself later – I just don’t remember if I have anything in SheepShaver that compresses files at the moment. (insert El Risitas laughing emote here)
I haven't done much music for anything serious since around 2000 other than just toying around for my own amusement.
I feel like first and foremost that’s what a large percentage of artistic creation is – endeavouring to create music we’d want to listen to/books we’d want to read/games we’d want to play/etc., and then hoping others will be interested. I’d be interested to hear whatever else you’ve done – the
Trojan soundtrack has a lot of nostalgia for me, and I’d always wondered if its composers did anything else.
This sounds great! Everything pretty much sounds exactly how I remember it. I was really exited to listen to those audio files included with the Trojan download, since I hadn't really heard those tracks the way they were supposed to sound for ages.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! And yeah, the intention with the remaster was to make sure they sounded almost exactly as they sounded on Mac, just with a little bit more headroom so as to preserve as much dynamic range as possible; I also mastered them all to around -20 dB RMS to ensure one level’s soundtrack wasn’t way louder than its predecessor’s (with the sole exception of the intro level, “Archangel Death”, which I mastered to -25 dB RMS).
(If you’re familiar with dynamic range logs, the entire soundtrack scored DR15, with the lowest scores being DR11 [“Archangel Death”, “Boy Are My Arms Tired”, and “Savage Streak”] and the highest being DR18 [“Eat Your Microwave”], though I think originally the worst score was probably around DR9 or something, so it’s a subtle difference. Of your tracks, “Say It with Grenades” and “Can’t Be Too Careful Nowadays” wound up with the highest dynamic ranges [DR17] and “Big Pig” with the lowest [DR12]. All of these have exemplary dynamic range, to be clear – DR11 would be an unusually high score for a modern rock or pop release.)
oh and yeah, the "Credits Screen" track is the one I was talking about. I had just bought a Yamaha CS1x around then and used it to make that weird acidy-sounding bass loop.
Yeah, it’s a really neat intro. I think I actually might’ve taken the liberty of extending the loop a little bit for the itch.io release by mix pasting two four-bar segments of it together and sticking them at the end or something, but I actually don’t remember now. The pandemic has basically destroyed my perception of time, and I don’t trust memories even a year old now.
In any case, if you ever do compose anything you think is worthy of exhibition, I’m working on several game projects that still need new compositions. If you’re on Discord, you can hit me up at the main server (
https://discord.gg/c7rEVgY) at @Aaron#6608. I’ll let you know if I come up with any interesting remixes of your
Trojan tracks – I haven’t messed around much with any modern DAW software, so I’m sure I’ll be fumbling at first, but hopefully I’ll pick it up soon enough. As I’m also finishing off a second degree and working on more game projects than sanity would dictate, though, it may not happen immediately.
Anyhow, great to meet/hear from you – hope you stick around.
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I'm actually really glad someone converted the QuickTime mid music from .mid to .ogg for the re-release, as I never got around to doing that. Check it out:
I also can't seem to find the last track, "Dance the Last Waltz..." Although if I recall correctly, that was the first track I did and sort of the prototype for the rest of the tracks as I figured out all the technical stuff on that one. So I may have put that one in its own folder that didn't get backed up.