Tag Archives: music

Audio Conversion Love

Posted on by John Rockefeller

I’m under a tight deadline for BastardBlaster, the game I’m building right now for the Guelph Game Jam, so I’ll share my quick and dirty way to convert audio files in Linux and using some Windows software with Wine.

The source music is music modules in the .it (Impulse Tracker) format. So, I used Winamp (running via Wine) to export as .wav files. From there, I used the MP3 to OGG conversion script on this page (modified a bit) to do:

./wav2ogg filename.wav filename.ogg

wav2ogg’s contents look like this:

[rocky1138@atlas Music]$ cat wav2ogg.sh
oggenc -o "$2" "$1"

Hope this helps someone in the future :) Note you have to have oggenc (vorbis-tools) installed in order for that to work :)

Now to do mp3s….

So I typed ABBA into Last.fm and I was lost for hours…

Posted on by John Rockefeller

… in the seemingly un-ending list of great disco / 70s pop songs. If you dislike ABBA, you’ll dislike this post. But, for me, there’s some ethereal quality about late 70s, early 80s pop songs. It was before I was born, so I have no experience with it, but for years I’ve listened to this stuff. It almost seems like the world was coming out of some sort of turtlenecked, bell-bottomed dream-world. Some of these really do deserve a remix. Anyway, enjoy the vids!

Baccara – Cara Mia

Agnetha – Can’t Shake Loose


(totally in need of a remix)

ABBA – I am the City

Baccara – Yes sir I can Boogie

Great Music to Program To

Posted on by John Rockefeller

Here’s a list of the top places I get my music, which I develop to:

1. Nectarine Demoscene Radio (http://www.nectarine.fr)

If you’ve ever watched a cracktro, and intro, or a demo, you know exactly what this is all about: the Demoscene!

2. Rainwave.cc Videogame Music Radio (http://www.rainwave.cc)

There are quite a few video game stations around the net but none offer the quality of music that Rainwave does. Each user can vote for songs as well as create an account that tracks all kinds of neat things. Definitely a hidden gem of the internet.

3. Modarchive – The internet’s largest collection of music modules (http://modarchive.org)

Many of you may not be familiar with the file formats that this website provides. WinAMP will play all of them, though. Give it a try. Music modules are similar to MIDI music in that they contain the electronic “sheet music” of the music inside them, but they also go a step further and include samples of each of the instruments used in the music. This was very helpful at a time when home computers could not handle large compressed audio (such as MP3) and MIDI quality was poor.

4. Demoscene.tv – streaming video of demos (http://www.demoscene.tv)

Though it seems a bit of a waste to stream video but only listen to the audio, this site really shines if you have a second monitor that you blast this site’s streams on fullscreen. Great graphics, fast streams. Perfect for programming.

5. Kohina – Old School game and demo music (http://www.kohina.org)

Kohina is a good station that plays tracks not found or often played on other stations. For this, it’s not a regular on my speakers. But, it is nice to sometimes leave the beaten path and explore some new sounds.

6. Digitally Imported – di.fm (http://www.di.fm)

Digitally imported is one of the largest streaming radio sites on the internet today. They have a ton of different stations ranging from Trance (my favorite) to things like Ambient and Chillout (also good). Plus, they offer high-quality streams for only $4.95 / month.

I’m always on the lookout for more internet radio stations or demo/videogame music sites. Does anyone have any not listed here? Please tell me!