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by CapComMDb at 12:12 PM EST on February 4, 2012
Looking forward to when you get to Metroid II. I was looking at the music again awhile back and realized some of the songs are constructed much differently from other game music I have encountered.

While some tracks such as the main caves theme use standard loops, others like the last BGM track before the ending treat the sound channels individually. What I mean by this is the track will have a loop for one of the square wave channels that lasts 13 seconds and one for the second channel that lasts 15 seconds. Then there will be a third loop for the triangle wave that is 11 seconds. Since they don't sync together, in order for the track to sound EXACTLY as it does when it begins, the loop point would be something like 53 minutes, which is ridiculous.

Basically, these tracks do not correspond to standard loops and timing, as with other game music I have encountered. And that makes Metroid II unique. What I did to try and solve this problem was look for the channel with the longest loop and use that as the point of where to time my rips. It's easier to tell if you use a program where you can turn on and off each of the sound channels and look at the wave form.

Since we're on topic, I was curious if anyone had encountered any other soundtracks that do something similar.
Hey, Knurek. by Electric Keet at 12:45 PM EST on February 7, 2012
So I started my GBS tagging effort with "Tetris Attack" and posted that somewhere on this forum, though I didn't include JPN or EUR release info. Should I go back and fill that in, or are we covered?

Anyhow, it looks like "Castlevania - The Adventure", "Double Dragon", "Quarth", "Dr. Mario", and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Fall of the Foot Clan" were already in my queue to work on, so if you have timed sets to work with, I'd gladly take the tagging effort from here!
by Knurek at 4:41 PM EST on February 7, 2012
@Electric Keet:

Here you go: Game Boy Playlists

I have the Tetris Attack, and will use it... well, in 2015, I guess. ;)
Pedanticism. Pedanticness? Pedanticality. by Electric Keet at 5:27 PM EST on February 8, 2012
And here I go, making trouble for myself....

1) The @TITLE line in the M3U comment block shows up weird in fb2k, which interprets it correctly as an album name except for leaving the "@TITLE" in there... seriously. I have no idea why. Thus, I've added a comment with the game's title by itself up there, and that works fine.

2) Should I be working to get the Japanese track names and other info in there when available? Perhaps as a commented-out alternate list or the like? I'm not sure how thorough you wish to be with the metadata for all of this.

What I have right now for "Castlevania: The Adventure" can be seen at this Pastebin – feel free to yell at me until I get things to where you wish them, Knurek. *grin*

edited 5:27 PM EST February 8, 2012
by Knurek at 2:25 AM EST on February 9, 2012
@Electric Keet:

1) That's clearly a bug in foo_gep - @TITLE tags with a colon get misinterpreted. It's up to kode54 to fix it, and if you want to have it look okay, try changing it to a hyphen (haven't tested it yet, though).

2) Additional data is up to you, I'm not going to remove anything that's relevant - if you want to, you can even add a review of the music. :)

Looks okay to me, thank you very much.
by Dais! at 6:04 AM EST on February 9, 2012
looking forward to that tagged m3u for Quarth, EK.

regarding Japanese tags, I think when you have something like the Castlevania Adventure music where we have basically all the information about it for both languages, it would be a nice touch to have a separate Japanese version of the playlist. Anyone really curious can open both files to compare them, and it's a bit friendlier to any Japanese contributors the site might attract.

Knurek, I see that in addition to here and at NESDev, you also posted about the new archive at the Gaming Force forums. Is there any one central place you're discussing your plans for the site? I have about a half-dozen questions concerning it, mostly in line with what Electric Keet already asked and further matters of redundancy and such. Should I just ask them here?
by Knurek at 8:15 AM EST on February 9, 2012
@Dais!:

This seems to be a good place - threads on other forums don't seem to get any responses. :)
by Dais! at 10:29 AM EST on February 9, 2012
Okay then. Bear with me, my thoughts on this aren't exactly organized...

1. Could you please list all the systems/formats you're currently considering for this site? Just to show where I'm coming from, these are the relevant formats I'm currently aware of:

GB/C - GBS, GBR, miniGSF, VGM
GG - KSS, SGC, VGM
NGP/C - VGM
WS/C - WSR
GBA - (mini)GSF
DS - (mini)2SF, streamed stuff, the occasional weird thing like that pool game with some module format
PSP - streamed stuff, probably other things I don't know about

With currently no (?) representation for:
-3DS, Vita (by the time you get there, there might be)
-Virtual Boy
-Lynx
-Pocketstation & VMU (not sure they are even relevant)
-Weird stuff like the Gamate, Game.com, Gameking, Supervision, etc
-Odd hybrid systems like the GP-whatevers, N-gage, cellphones, iOS/Android/whatever stuff, etc

Although some of those could probably be covered under the VGM format eventually. The later mobile stuff that could possibly be relevant is a quagmire, but it will be a while before those decisions have to be made.

2. What is being considered with regards to redundancy between formats? For example, if both a GBS and GBR are available for a game and the GBS contains all the sound data, will the GBR not be put up? I'm going to assume VGM is the preferred format for Game Gear music, but will you still have KSS/SGC rips? If someone creates a VGM set for a Game Boy game which has a perfectly functional GBS, will it also get put up if submitted?

{as an aside, maybe you could collaborate somehow with the forum set up to discuss non-Sega VGM rips)

3. I'm probably over-thinking this, especially in terms of how significant of a problem it might be by the time the issue is raised in your updates, but what do you think about some games having their sets combined to save space/bandwidth? For example, both sets are fairly small, but I believe the 2SF part of the sets for Front Mission DS and Front Mission 2089 DS are (practically speaking) identical outside of the sequences (and streaming file) added to the latter. In a more meaningful example, I think some of the ADX files in the Doki Majo Shinpan games are identical. This issue/opportunity will probably come up with some PSP games as well.

4. Will the site include the few SPC sets related to Super Game Boy titles?

5. What kind of, uh, system is going to be in place for verifying whether data on things like developer/composer/etc is valid/useful? I would assume there's going to be something like the forum that accompanies SNESMusic.org, but I'd like to know by what process it would be determined that, say, I would decide who to credit for Dragon Slayer Gaiden.

Let me outline my trouble with this particular game:
-The credits list last names only, and sound is credited to "Ootaka" (おおたか).

-I looked up that the game was developed by Agenda (AKA Argent), and they developed another 1992 GB title for Epoch, Doraemon 2, where an Akira Ootaka (おおたか あきら) is credited for sound.

-The same composer is presumably the one who worked on Doraemon 4 SFC, where he can be seen credited for sound here (which is how his name ended up on SNESMusic, I presume)

-GameMusicMEMO lists him for the two GB games and some X68k game (Flappy 2), but the "大高亮" given for his name hasn't led me anywhere for confirmation, just to sites mirroring the same basic information given above or talking about what appears to be totally unrelated things/people

-Even assuming I'm confident that Akira Ootaka is the dude I want, what do I make of the "Akira Ohtaka" listed in the credits for Prince of Persia PCE-CD and Spider-man: Lethal Foes? Both are Agenda/Argent games, but neither credit him for audio work. And of course, some person at Mobygames thinks it should be "Akira Ōtaka".

I guess this is more whining about doing internet detective work and having nothing conclusive to show for it, but what kind of process/discussion will determine who the composer should ultimately be listed as? Tagger's best judgment?

6. Similarly, where are reports of errors in sets going to be submitted - through the same submission method for tagging and such? I've found a small number of GBS sets that seem to be missing some tracks, although the one you're closest to is Knight Quest - I don't have my notes at the moment, but I'm fairly sure that the song that plays when you pull up the map isn't in the set available in the current GBS archive, and there may be other tracks missing.


I probably have more questions bubbling up from the back of my brain, but this will certainly do for now.

edited 10:35 AM EST February 9, 2012
by Electric Keet at 2:22 PM EST on February 9, 2012
Aaaaaaand it seems that I can't cajole foo_gep into not choking terribly on any form of UTF-8 playlist. I've tried it with BOM, without BOM, named as an M3U, named as an M3U8, and I even threatened to make GEP watch a marathon of MLP:FiM episodes, and none of it worked, because foo_gep stops parsing the playlist the moment it sees anything that's not a nice happy Latin-1 character.

The solution, for now, is simply to mirror the playlist with all the Japanese info after the non-Unicode-containing English playlist. Commented out, but easily recovered should one desire.

. . . this is a terrible format, isn't it? I'm not sure if I should be blaming GBS, M3U, or GEP more at this point. Ah, well. On to Quarth, at Dais' request.
by Knurek at 3:45 PM EST on February 9, 2012
@Electric Keet: Try saving the playlist in Shift-JIS encoding, seems to work fine here after that (tested with some KSS playlists).

@Dais!:
1, 2) Regarding formats, basically, what you just wrote. I'll try to use one format for each system if possible (so, GBS instead of GBR/VGM for Game Boy, SGC or KSS if the former doesn't exist for Game Gear).

I'd like to include Lynx and Virtual Boy as well, but no formats for those, and I'm not crazy enough to record music for these systems in an emulator.

3) I'll probably end up including all music from a game in a set, so, for instance, Pokemon Crystal will have both Silver/Gold songs and new ones. Space shouldn't be a problem till we reach NDS, and by then, if we still assume 3 games released per day, we should all be living in the matrix.

4) No plans on including SGB SPC sets but datschge is writing the frontend for the site, so adding a link to SNESMusic.org's page for the game should be trivial (since both sites will be sharing composer/company/etc databases).

5) You are aware that the two GB games GameMusicMEMO lists for Akira Ootaka are Doraemon 2 and Dragon Slayer Gaiden? ;)

Basically, I'm going for the totally unscientific approach of having some trusted sources (GameMusicMEMO, ROM text/Game Staff Roll, Composer Homepages/Interviews, VGMDB) and treating every other source (GameFAQs, Wikipedia, people submissions) as false until verified from one of the trusted sources.

6) There should be a big "Contact Me" button on each set page, with my email address, so if anyone wants to send any corrections, they will reach me. This forum works as well - I'll start a proper, new thread once the site is live.
I'm checking all currently available rips against GBgbs/SGMkss output, to see if there isn't anything missing, so I hope to have complete sets for each game.

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