The Jazz Jackrabbit album cover unfortunately looks like furry porn.

Yeah, not a fan here either.

Wow. I haven't heard such badly compressed previews since youtube launched its groundbreaking 144p setting.

I have most of these already and probably in better quality as well. I do wonder what synths they used for the MIDI games?

I'm downloading the FLAC's now, so I'll be able to tell you shortly 😉

Well, with statements like...

Technical limitations meant that Cosmo's soundtrack had to be experienced via the PC speaker

...I wonder what level of attention to detail is to be expected. Elsewhere they write that the songs were captured from "original hardware" without emulation, but some of the previews sound very brickwalled, so who knows what kind of post-processing was applied.

and really, some of those album covers look too much like rejected Threadless t-shirt designs. Needs moar pixelated crt-effect madness and less skinny-jeans hipster action. 🙁

I just had a quick listen to a handful of the Duke Nukem 2 tracks, and they definitely sound like they'd been recorded from real OPL hardware. If I turn it up quite loud, there does seem to be background noise, hinting that it's not a digital copy made using a software OPL emulator.

The Jazz Jackrabbit OST sounds great though. Very crisp and clean.

VileRancour wrote:

Well, with statements like...

Technical limitations meant that Cosmo's soundtrack had to be experienced via the PC speaker

...I wonder what level of attention to detail is to be expected. Elsewhere they write that the songs were captured from "original hardware" without emulation, but some of the previews sound very brickwalled, so who knows what kind of post-processing was applied.

Listening to the Cosmo's files now, and they sounds great.

The previews are a very poor reflection of the quality of these files.

Nice... how's the dynamic range? faithful, or "loudness war"-squashed?

Dynamic range sounds pretty faithful.

If I absolutely had to say there was something wrong, I'd say it feels like maybe possibly perhaps they've used an EQ to bring up the lows just a tiny fraction of a bee's dick. Maybe. That might be my earphones though, they're not exactly flat.

I have "Stalker" playing now, from the DN3D soundtrack. It sounds awfully close to SC-55, but not exactly the same, some of the string+brass instruments sound a bit clearer than I'm used to. Perhaps they used a different higher-end Roland synth.

I listened to the samples of the Duke Nukem 3D soundtrack and being a Roland SC-55 owner myself, I cringed. It's not so much the sounds are bad, but they forgot to edit the MIDI files to remove the FM and GUS instrument tracks on some of the songs which are not supposed to be played when you are using a General MIDI soundset.

SpooferJahk wrote:

I listened to the samples of the Duke Nukem 3D soundtrack and being a Roland SC-55 owner myself, I cringed. It's not so much the sounds are bad, but they forgot to edit the MIDI files to remove the FM and GUS instrument tracks on some of the songs which are not supposed to be played when you are using a General MIDI soundset.

Which tracks exactly? I have all the FLACs on my computer, I can have a listen and tell you if it's just that the samples are artefacty and craptacular.

SquallStrife wrote:

SpooferJahk wrote:

I listened to the samples of the Duke Nukem 3D soundtrack and being a Roland SC-55 owner myself, I cringed. It's not so much the sounds are bad, but they forgot to edit the MIDI files to remove the FM and GUS instrument tracks on some of the songs which are not supposed to be played when you are using a General MIDI soundset.

Which tracks exactly? I have all the FLACs on my computer, I can have a listen and tell you if it's just that the samples are artefacty and craptacular.

At the top of my head, Plasma, Gotham, Calypso Factor, Preparation D, and Ah Geez! come to the top of my head with this issue. It has nothing to do with compression, this issue happens when I play the raw unedited MIDI files on my Roland SC-55 unit. I will post some samples soon of what I mean but not right now since I am not near my unit and the connection at where I am at is not very good right now to upload samples somewhere.