Arachno Music Packs

[arachnosoft]

Doomhuntress said:

any reason why the electric and acoustic snare are the same on the electronic and standard drumkits in the soundfonts (as well as the acoustic kick and bass drum on the standard, i believe)? seeing as how these specific samples sound very different in GM, it'd make sense for them to be different in this soundfont, no? other than that, all the drumkits are actually pretty good in this soundfont. my pet-peeve is still how deep and bassy the standard kit is, but the other ones are pretty awesome.

When I built the drumkits, I was used to the Standard drumkit of my Creative AudioPCI 128 soundcard (EAPCI2M.ECW soundbank) which had similar sounds for both acoustic and "electric" snares.
When I chose Slavo's drums as Arachno SoundFont's standard drumkit, it also followed this trend, and being used to it, I kept it as-is.

I actually tried to mix different kick/bass drum and snare combinations afterwards - for each drumkit - but I wasn't satisfied by the results, especially while playing MIDI files which used the two sound pairs simultaneously (snares or bassdrum/kick).
I strongly dislike snare mixes like the power snare/standard electric snare combination on the SC-55's Power drum kit. Sounds so wrong to my ears...

When you listen to MIDIs, on a SC-55, which use both power kick (C3) and "electric" snare sounds from the Power drumkit (E3), you hear a punchy kick sound combined with the same standard - not to say bland - "electric" snare sound borrowed from the Standard drumkit...
While it would sound so much better using the power kick and the real power snare sitting in the "acoustic snare" slot (D3).

Listen, for example, to Robert C. Prince's excellent soundtrack from the "DemonStar" game, which uses the Power drumkit almost exclusively:
- Grab the original MIDI files from Mirsoft at http://www.mirsoft.info/gmb/music_info.php?id_ele=MTM4NjQ= and play track #3 (entitled "Phazer") on a Roland SC-55: in a solo situation the snare sounds very weak compared to the power kick (and the power snare used on other tracks);
- Compare this version to the one you can obtain on a Yamaha synth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLf_1p7ESs4&index=3&list=PLolnf4i65EgQwxepll5dl7pm65ZVtbFlg (or Arachno SoundFont itself), and you'll see what I mean.

That's why I simply made subtle differences between each sample on Arachno SoundFont, so they could blend together easily in a mix and remain consistent towards the overall drumkit...
Although I admit it may sound confusing on some MIDIs, and I can consider finding a compromise to solve this issue.

Do you have some example MIDIs on which you felt it could be improved?
Don't forget to give me your "reference" synth so I can hear what you did expect.

Thanks!

[Devalaous]

Hmm, I wonder if NightFright will "upgrade" TNT Revilution's soundtrack like with Plutonia 2/PRCP. It wont really work with Ionian Isolation, and maybe a few other tracks.

Anyway, I have some of these packs on my google drive, computer broke before I could change the sharing settings, but anyway, theres another source for them.

Still wondering about the fate of the last four IWAD packs.

[Tristan]

Ragnor said:

Hmm, I wonder if NightFright will "upgrade" TNT Revilution's soundtrack like with Plutonia 2/PRCP. It wont really work with Ionian Isolation, and maybe a few other tracks.

II's seashore is destroyed by quite a few soundfonts, which use a pretty general shore sound for all patches, where I used the lowest note possible in GM, another reason I took advantage of SGM's GM2 support to put the winds in. The helicopter has known to be a bit of a joke too on some.
The rest of my tracks are very bass-y, so Arachno should sound pretty cool on them.

oh boy, Arachno is the one with the obvious helicopter, and bird tweets for that matter. Sweep is awesome, but drowns out basically everything.
hmm.

[NightFright]

I am working on an updated release for the Duke3D Arachno Pack to include Lee Jackson's extended Grabbag version. Once it is ready, it will be published on the HRP website. Will also notify you here then, ofc. ^^

Whether I will do any other soundtrack conversions is yet to be decided. The process is not a small task: First MUS files must be converted to MID format, then you have to convert them to WAV, normalize and convert to OGG. If you do MP3 files, you need to put the IDv3 tags on each and every file (which is the worst part of it).

At least I found a better hosting service than Rapidshare (which is soon too expensive for me to afford). For that reason, I have updated the primary download links in the initial post.

[arachnosoft]

NightFright said:

I am working on an updated release for the Duke3D Arachno Pack to include Lee Jackson's extended Grabbag version. Once it is ready, it will be published on the HRP website. Will also notify you here then, ofc. ^^

I noticed you updated the pack already... many thanks!
I'll mirror it on my own Free.fr webspace (replacing the older version) within the next hours :)

NightFright said:

Whether I will do any other soundtrack conversions is yet to be decided. The process is not a small task: First MUS files must be converted to MID format, then you have to convert them to WAV, normalize and convert to OGG. If you do MP3 files, you need to put the IDv3 tags on each and every file (which is the worst part of it).

Agreed ;)
I even have a written procedure to put tags in my files, using three different tools sequencially, to ensure all tags are put properly (ID3 v1, ID3 v2.x).

While we're on this particular subject: the Duke 3D Arachno Music Pack is only available in OGG format, and, as far as I know, you didn't put any meta tag information in these files.
Is there a particular reason for that? I use the same series of tools to add meta tags on my MP3/OGG files, and tags can be set on both formats.

NightFright said:

At least I found a better hosting service than Rapidshare (which is soon too expensive for me to afford). For that reason, I have updated the primary download links in the initial post.

Great news!
To be honest, I never succeeded in downloading anything from RapidShare...

[NightFright]

All the Duke3D music packs I have created so far were made for the only purpose of ingame usage. Since EDuke32 only supports OGG, the choice was kinda natural.
Until now, I just haven't considered making separate MP3 versions for listening purposes. I could do it for the Arachno pack at least - once I get to it. I have been very sick for the last 1.5 months and have a lot of RL stuff to catch up. Eventually there should be some time to provide this as some kinda bonus download maybe. With a bit of luck, I will have also found a tool for automated IDv3 tagging until then. xD

[Devalaous]

Finally got access to my google drive again. Heres the link to the stuff I uploaded if another source is needed. Probably dont have everything on there, I did this primarily to link a friend to, who was getting into the Doom engine games.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzHAkgqTw2tLcExRVXhxQmZIbVk/edit?usp=sharing