Jaxxoon R's Dark Ambient Pack

What is this?

This is a collection of some 17 ambient songs I made in the past year or so with the intention of letting folks use them in their horror wads as an alternative to the usual rips of the PSX soundtrack, for variety's sake. There's also the fear I hold that hearing them on such a frequent basis can lead to them losing their impact, like that one episode of Spongebob where he stops finding the Dutchman scary after living with him for a few months.

For what is this?

This pack takes advantage of Zdoom's $musicalias command, allowing for it to be used for general-purpose music replacement. It also is technically compatible with the PSX TC but I honestly didn't put too much thought into the music selection. Ignoring $musicalias, the bare resources can potentially be used in any port supporting ogg vorbis playback.

How can I preview this?

I've uploaded a few of the tracks to my YouTube channel, they can be listened to in this playlist.

Where can I get this?

Get it on /Idgames

Sounds pretty cool, at one point did you have thoughts to do full 32 tracks?

My only complaint is some of the tracks are on the short side.

Cool! I much prefer ambient music for Doom over traditional MIDI metal. I haven't got time to listen until after work but I'm looking forward to it. :)

Hopefully, it'll make a nice change from PSX, D64 and PSXSM (my favourite). :)

I intended to do as much as would fit under 20 Megabytes, which is why some of the tracks are rather short.

And uh.. what's PSXSM?

I'm a huge fan of Aubrey Hodges' PSX and Doom 64 ambient music. I have some experience in digital music myself, but it's been quite some time since I dabbled in that particular musical pool.

May I ask Jaxxoon, what software tools you used to make these tracks? I now only have a laptop and absolutely zero external MIDI devices, so I'm relying exclusively on my shitty laptop and it's ability to sequence samples stored on my equally shitty hard drive.

PS. I really like your ambient pack.. Probably should have said that right at the start.

I just used Audacity for everything. That is entirely not at all the right way to go about it but I don't really have access to a tracker program, so whatever.

Oh and thanks, it's no worry.

good stuff, keep up the good work

There's some really good tracks in here that have that classic 90's feel them that Aubrey's work had. Great job!

Since you don't have that much sound equipment to work with I'll give you some sound designing advice that's been passed down for generations: get your hands on a convolution reverb plugin!
Luckily for you, I saved you the trouble of hunting one down that's compatible with Audacity: Freeverb. It's a bit out-dated looking, but it'll do.
Freeverb comes with several reverb plugins that may or may not be of use to you, but the convolution reverb plugin is a must-have when you're limited on resources but looking to create new sounds.
Try using the sound of flies swarming as a base and crunching tin foil as the impulse and see what you get!

Also, if you don't have it installed already, make sure to install the Audacity VST Bridge to allow Audacity to load up VST's.

Keep up the good work!

Jaxxoon R said:

I intended to do as much as would fit under 20 Megabytes, which is why some of the tracks are rather short.

And uh.. what's PSXSM?

PSXSM is my favourite music replacement pack for Doom and Doom 2. Some of the tracks are legitimately great pieces of music in their own right. Here's a link to the blog:

http://doomfanatic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/psxsm.html

Personally, I have it on autoload and I love it. :)

Odd thing is his site says it's on /idgames, but it's actually not.

My post got lost in the server transfer, so I ask again.

Could you release those ambient tracks in a simple zip file instead of a wad file? I want to chek them out and maybe use them in a Doom3 level.

You can use SLADE3 to export them.

Yes, I could also install some wad explorer tool, but maybe Jaxxoon wants to release the tracks anyway.

Alright then.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/161031419/Jaxx%20Pack.zip

It's even got some super bonus songs that I've made since creating the pack originally.

Nice stuff, using it with a random mapset at the moment and it blends very well with the PSX sounds.

Thank you very much, Jaxxon! There are some really nice ambient tracks in there.