Music
From Damasca
Contents |
Introduction
Damasca has always strived to have good music, and to this end, has begun to take action in developing its musical score. While Damasca does not have a recording studio nor a collection of real instruments to work from, the project has turned to the next best thing, which is computer-composed music - More specifically, MIDI. While MIDI today has fallen into obscurity for everything but cell phone ringtones, one of the project's main concerns is to be able to support 56k connections. With MIDI music, an installation package will be much smaller - To a magnitude of hundreds of MiB smaller.
General Style
Damasca's music will be orchestral in nature focusing primarily on a more 'classical' sound, rather than relying on more modern instruments such as electric guitars and square waves. Thus far, the general theme can be described as a medium between the Final Fantasy series, the "... of Mana" series, and the Castlevania series.
Formats
The main formats for Damasca's music are MIDI (.mid), Ogg Vorbis (AoTuV, .ogg), and AACPlusv2 (Nero, .m4a). We also use Monkey's Audio (.ape) for storing lossless copies of recorded music.
MIDI is an older format, used mainly in older games and, today, cellular phone ringtones. Filesizes are typically in the KiB range, usually much less than 100KiB, and since the actual sound is not recorded with the file (only the "sheet music"), the quality of the music depends upon the quality of the MIDI "mapper", or player available. For most people, this will be "Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth", which is an adequate, but poor quality synth. MIDI music can sometimes sound twangy, and is generally easily recognized due to this. MIDI music is available by default to those with low-bandwidth connections or who don't want to download a music package.
Ogg Vorbis is a newer, open-source format, which means it has no limitations on its use. It provides a higher quality-per-bitrate ratio than MP3, and is our top-quality format for Damasca. Unlike MIDI, Ogg Vorbis is recorded from a single source, so it does not have to go through a "mapper". However, this also means that it has a much larger filesize - To the order of approximately 2.1MiB for a 3:00 song.
AACPlus v2 is a proprietary, but freely-available format by Coding Technologies (not Apple) that provides amazing quality at very low bitrates. Where an MP3 might take 128kbps to encode a file, AACPlus v2 can encode that same file to roughly the same quality at 48kbps, which translates to roughly 2.5 times smaller. Our AACPlus v2 files are our Medium and Low quality file types, and we use 48kbps for medium (1MiB per 3:00), and 24kbps for low (540KiB per 3:00). Our AACPlus v2 files are also encoded using the Nero encoder, which provides the best quality sound for the sizes we need.
Monkey's Audio is a free, open-source format that provides exceptional compression without losing any quality. Our setting for Monkey's Audio is Extra High, which makes a 3:00 file about 15-16MiB, versus the same WAV file taking up about 31MiB. These files will not be distributed, or, if they are, will be available via Bittorrent only.
Sound Sets
Damasca's official soundset is a modification of RealFont 2.1 by Michel Villeneuve of Musimedia.ca known as 'Milo'. It is currently nearing 400MB in size and offers a great range of different types of realistic sounds for which to use with music composition. Much work has gone into the sound set to ensure that the instruments used sound as realistic as possible, while still being easy to use. Damasca's musicians have been using this set for some time now, and the results speak for themselves.
The current version of the sound set is RealFont 2.3, and is currently in a locked state. This is the final version that will be used in the project. Other tools involved with the sound set include SynthFont, a free Soundfont player/mixer, and XMPlay, a free media player like Winamp that can be fitted with a plugin to play MIDI using Soundfonts.
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