Quake Soundtrack

[The Civ]

I've reinstalled Quake recently, and along with it, downloaded the OGG version of the soundtrack. I placed it in id1/music in my Quake folder, but I still can't get any music to play? Any help?

[scalliano]

You need a port that can handle .OGG music playback.

Also, this belongs in Everything Else.

[Da Werecat]

Vanilla engine can't play ogg files. Or wav, or mp3, or whatever. It reads music tracks from the CD.

If you really need Quake to read music from ogg files, you need a source port.

[The Civ]

Da Werecat said:

Vanilla engine can't play ogg files. Or wav, or mp3, or whatever. It reads music tracks from the CD.

If you really need Quake to read music from ogg files, you need a source port.

I've been using QuakeSpasm and DarkPlaces both to see which would work, and it seems that neither do. Should have mentioned that.

[hex11]

Da Werecat said:

If you really need Quake to read music from ogg files, you need a source port.

An ISO or bin/cue image mounted as dosbox cdrom wouldn't do the trick?

[Da Werecat]

Have you named the tracks correctly? They should go like this:

track02.ogg
track03.ogg
track04.ogg
...

[Technician]

The Civ said:

I've been using QuakeSpasm and DarkPlaces both to see which would work, and it seems that neither do. Should have mentioned that.

I think all you have to do is put the music files into a folder labeled "music" in the same file as the executable. It's been a while.

[The Civ]

Da Werecat said:

Have you named the tracks correctly? They should go like this:

track02.ogg
track03.ogg
track04.ogg
...

Here's exactly what it looks like:

[Da Werecat]

1. Well, the names are wrong.
2. "Firefox HTML Document"?

[The Civ]

Da Werecat said:

1. Well, the names are wrong.
2. "Firefox HTML Document"?

It opens up with Firefox, but it's still labeled as OGG when you go into file properties.

[Linguica]

track02 != track002

[Da Werecat]

hex11 said:

An ISO or A bin/cue image mounted as dosbox cdrom wouldn't do the trick?

Well, that wouldn't be about ogg files anymore.

Besides, DOSBox? I'd rather use WinQuake (which is official) with a regular virtual drive.

[hex11]

Well I mean you can convert the OGG files to WAV and make cdrom image. Granted it's better to start with fresh WAV files directly from your Quake CD (assuming you haven't lost it in past two decades...) but probably most people won't tell much difference between OGG and WAV files in this kind of music...

Dunno anything about WinQuake, I only had qtest, DOS shareware, and then Linux version with full game (before it was open-source). Never used music before... I felt there's enough sounds inside the game (and the sounds are important cues about what's happening, so don't want to muffle them). Plus it seemed more immersive to play with just the sounds. And I played DM or CTF most of the time, so music just made it harder to tell what's going on in the game. But last time I looked, QuakeWorld servers are empty and desolate...

[Aliotroph?]

Fun fact: vanilla Quake will play the tracks from pretty much any audio CD. I left a David Lanz CD (new age music, totally inappropriate for Quake) in the PC when I was a kid and it was happy to play that. Everyone else covered what you really need. I'm just being a nerd here.

[Avoozl]

I remember buying an anthology pack of the three Quake games a decade or so ago because I wanted to play the games with their actual music, but unfortunately I found they didn't even add the music tracks to the new CD's of Quake 1 and 2.

[TimeOfDeath]

Aliotroph? said:

Fun fact: vanilla Quake will play the tracks from pretty much any audio CD. I left a David Lanz CD (new age music, totally inappropriate for Quake) in the PC when I was a kid and it was happy to play that.

Yeah, I used to stick in a Cannibal Corpse cd once in a while. :)

[Lila Feuer]

I also recall Quake and Quake II were very finicky with what drive letter it wanted to read CD tracks off of, if I used a virtual drive with anything but the D letter the tracks wouldn't play.

[Patrol1985]

1. Linguica has it right (name the file "track02" etc. not "track002")
2. If you want to make an .ISO and mount it, make sure the virtual drive is assigned the first letter of the optical drives (i.e. if your DVD drive is D: and virtual CD drive is E: you have to switch them for the soundtrack to work)
3. Make sure the directory structure is correct for your source port as it's not always id1/music. For instance, the correct directory structure for Dark Places is this:

Quake/id1/sound/cdtracks/

[Gez]

Aliotroph? said:

Fun fact: vanilla Quake will play the tracks from pretty much any audio CD. I left a David Lanz CD (new age music, totally inappropriate for Quake) in the PC when I was a kid and it was happy to play that. Everyone else covered what you really need. I'm just being a nerd here.

Same was true of every game with an audio CD soundtrack that allowed a full install (no CD access for data during play).

[ducon]

I used to play Quake with Brian Eno’s Neroli. It fits perfectly, especially in Azure Agony.

[Enjay]

Ha! I just remembered that it was common for game CDs to have "do not play track 1" on them somewhere to stop people putting them into their CD players and trying to play the data track (which could cause problems for some players apparently).