#Finding Music
# I often browse through music from old obscure SNES games or midi files looking for background music for my little games. That’s my usual approach. Maybe I’ll find something good I haven’t used yet.
#Places to find SNES music
#Download the SPC files
# Incidentally, Addams Family Values on the SNES has WAY better music than you would expect considering how primitive the game looks. It’s impressively well composed and very moody.
# Dragon Quest VI from the SNES seems to have a lot of thematically useful music. It even has some leit motif which gives many songs similar melodies, making them seem to belong together. Could be useful. RPG’s tend to have a useful variety of musical themes.
#Picking Music
# I usually make a list of moods for the scenes in the game. Then I look for music that conveys those moods.
# …Then I drag shortcuts of the various songs, label them with their moods, and place them into a “possibilities” folder. Then I compare them to each other to figure out which ones work best and sound best together.
#Converting Files
# I pick the best ones out of the possibilities and copy their shortcuts out of that folder. Then I open the original songs and export them to WAV files. If it’s a midi song I usually replace the instruments with a better soundfont like Musica_Theoria_v2 which I think originally came from sf2midi back when that site existed.
# I use Winamp
# … along with these plugins
#Making Loops
# I cut the songs into clean loops.
# Then I encode them as mp3’s for my RPG Maker using a program called mp3loop to resample the loop portions very slightly and encode the mp3’s in a way that allows them to loop seamlessly without the audible gap you’d normally get.
# I only need MP3 files while I’m editing the game. Later on when I convert the game into a single self-contained Flash file, I import the WAV files directly into Flash and it can internally compress the looping music with no gaps.
