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[BubblePipeMedia]

So, in the world of retro music, things are finally moving on a byte here and there. I've seen more soundtracks and albums pushing FM synth (genesis) and now a few wanting SNES style music. I read an article in Game Developer Magazine mentioning SNES soundfonts, but I think because it's sample based that would be bad (probably illegal) to use in music composition for new games. So, as fellow creative audio guys, how would you go about making new SNES style tune? My thoughts would be to re-sample my own virtual instruments (from NI, or EW, whatever), and use that to create new instruments that sound worse and only use one or two samples. Obviously, I'd not encode that as a soundfont in the game (though, man, that would save awesome memory, it would also probably be against the license in most cases).

Are there any sample libraries that would allow you to resample them into your own soundfont-style thing to put in games? (I'd probably not compose that way, too much of a control freak when it comes to mixing, but I know it would appeal to others, especially for iOS titles).

Are there any soundfont sites that aren't free and questionable? I remember running into an audio guy, or someone who knew an audio guy (specific, I know), who specialized in making new soundfonts for games or composers, so they're probably out there somewhere, just hard to wade through the waves of 'free'.

What might some processing ideas for making your own be, be beyond some mild bit-reduction? There's a very narrow frequency range, it seems, perhaps due to compression, perhaps to accommodate that sample being used in multiple octaves.

An out of the box options might be Absynth. It sometimes uses single samples to generate sounds and while certainly not all of them fit the SNES style, there are quite a few that I think would emulate it well. It's a lot to wade through, but I suspect it would be a lot easier to go this route than re-purposing vsti's into soundfonts just to get that retro cheesy sound. What other programs exist that emulate that single sample sound?

When looking around at some of the interesting soundfonts people ripped from SNES samples and then messed around with (it's pretty neat to listen to), I noticed one person who mentioned the lack of the distinct SNES echo. It's funny how you can forget such things. I tried it out and used the shortest echo Logic had and it worked pretty well with Absynth to give that extra SNES layer/feel.

I suspect we'll all be seeing more and more retro tunes with specific years in mind other than 8-bit. Give it time and we'll have games that want to mimic N64 or, crazy enough, the bad footsteps and voice acting of PS1 era games. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing. I wonder if anyone will ever want to emulate the flyback sound of an old CRT. I sure hope not, but I bet it'll happen at some point in some game in order to be more authentic. I'm curious whats out there, what others are doing in this style, solutions they've come up with.

[GavinHarrisonSounds]

Ahhh this question!  Well there are loads of options out there, but I agree soundfonts are probably not the way to go due to legal issues, hence why personally I've always avoided them.  When it comes to that 'SNES' sound you have to take into account the restrictions of the chip used in the first place, and then pick the correct sounds.

I have to be honest and say emulating the SNES is something I've yet to properly give a go, but I have had some success in creating a Megadrive style (as can be heard in this tune http://soundcloud.com/gavinharrison/go-copter ) but there it really is a matter of going back to FM synthesis.

Key things are to not use too many channels, and to pick sounds wisely!  Probably not a lot of help but sometimes the one rule is to do what sounds best!

[BubblePipeMedia]

Ahhh this question!  Well there are loads of options out there, but I agree soundfonts are probably not the way to go due to legal issues, hence why personally I've always avoided them.  When it comes to that 'SNES' sound you have to take into account the restrictions of the chip used in the first place, and then pick the correct sounds.

I have to be honest and say emulating the SNES is something I've yet to properly give a go, but I have had some success in creating a Megadrive style (as can be heard in this tune http://soundcloud.com/gavinharrison/go-copter ) but there it really is a matter of going back to FM synthesis.

Key things are to not use too many channels, and to pick sounds wisely!  Probably not a lot of help but sometimes the one rule is to do what sounds best!

Funny enough, I'd probably never use super-advanced emulations, I prefer simple solutions, like keeping channel count in mind and picking the right sound as you said. I know someone somewhere will hack a SNES cartridge and import their own sounds to create brand new SNES music though. I recently saw that someone found a way to hack their genesis with a midi port of some sort for direct access to the FM chip which is awesome(and partially what inspired me to post this, to see what's out there for SNES). But I don't know if I would go that extra mile over just using FM8 or similar. But I do think it's neat and the amount of work people go through for authenticity is amazing. According to wikipedia, the SNES has 8 channels up to 16-bit, with an echo option of up to a 24th of a second. You could also change the ADSR.

I have no pressing gig to do this for, I just find the whole idea neat and want to see what others are doing.

Oh, and if anyone is interested in what the genesis midi thing is - http://little-scale.com/

[JackMenhorn]

VOPM and FMMF are synths that Surrashu recommended to me for that style. 

[Polly]

I know someone somewhere will hack a SNES cartridge and import their own sounds to create brand new SNES music though.

This project is somewhat similar to the GenMDM cart. Example device ->



Commonly used tools are MIDI2MSS (

) and XMSNES which convert MIDI or XM to SPC-700 compatible formats .. which is also the reason why platforms like the SNES / GBA aren't as popular as the NES / Game Boy / Megadrive when it comes to audio, they are outdated wave-table players opposed to vintage synthesizers.

[BubblePipeMedia]

I know someone somewhere will hack a SNES cartridge and import their own sounds to create brand new SNES music though.

This project is somewhat similar to the GenMDM cart. Example device ->



Commonly used tools are MIDI2MSS (

) and XMSNES which convert MIDI or XM to SPC-700 compatible formats .. which is also the reason why platforms like the SNES / GBA aren't as popular as the NES / Game Boy / Megadrive when it comes to audio, they are outdated wave-table players opposed to vintage synthesizers.

That's really awesome, great link. I knew someone would be crazy enough to do the 'real thing'.

[BubblePipeMedia]

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/19391959/fightmenow.mp3

So, I made this in Logic using Play instruments. I figured I'd make my experiment and results public.

What I did: I used some of my many Play instruments to generate one note sustains, which I then bounced with Logic. I bounced it without dithering at 8 bit (where dithering isn't an option in Logic, I suspect the noise floor would be too high anyway) and at a sample rate of 12000.

I feel my current example is a bit too full spectrum, which is odd since it only uses 3 instruments. Perhaps I need to find thinner samples and make sure they don't take up multiple octaves (or two at most). So, next time, I'm going to plot my instrument arrangement beforehand, so that the octaves of the instruments don't conflict as much. I did the composition itself quickly, it wasn't really the focus of my experiment. I did a bit of master EQing and mild speaker emulation. Also, I used a short echo to emulate the SNES echo processor on some of the instruments.

[BattleBeard]

 Just use a real SNES

GET ON MY LEVEL, NEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRD

or just use milkytracker with spc-ripped instruments

[Player 3]

Just use a real SNES

GET ON MY LEVEL, NEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRD

or just use milkytracker with spc-ripped instruments

http://www.zophar.net/utilities/rippers/snessor95.html

SNESSOR 95 would be a key essence to that, but the problem with that is that these instruments are under copyright by their creators, like the ROMs they're ripped from.

[MoritzPGKatz]

Hello,

We had a thread like this over at Gamedev.net not too long ago.
Some useful info in there.

Whoop.

Cheers,
Moritz

[s0]

What I did: I used some of my many Play instruments to generate one note sustains, which I then bounced with Logic. I bounced it without dithering at 8 bit (where dithering isn't an option in Logic, I suspect the noise floor would be too high anyway) and at a sample rate of 12000.

I feel my current example is a bit too full spectrum, which is odd since it only uses 3 instruments

The problem is that the SPC uses a special ADPCM based compression method, so just bitrate reducing and downsampling your samples in a computer-based audio editor/DAW is probably not going to sound 100% authentically SNES-like.

The samples for the SPC are stored in a compressed format known as BRR. Unlike raw samples, the SPC samples are divided into 9-byte blocks. Each block encodes the equivalent of 16 raw 16-bit samples.

http://emureview.ztnet.com/developerscorner/SoundCPU/spc.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_Rate_Reduction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADPCM

[mixwell]

A simple way is to use NI Massive to generate the chiptune sounds. Its fairly easy and the sequencer makes it one unique synth especially for this kind of job (and FX as well).

There's even a Video Game preset library for it but i recommend creating your own because its a piece of cake.