A discussion on restoring EQ's music once and for all

[km2783]

I think me and Ableton Live have a new project.

At a minimum I plan to run the new, dead MP3s through a nice reverb plugin. If anyone wants to send me classic songs from a not as good sound card as an MP3 I'll see what I can do.

Long term, I have much bigger plans that involve those precious MIDI files and some nice samples. I'll probably even start with the Kelethin theme.

What I'm really curious about is can we somehow hybridize this? All the music of the XMI files while using MP3s? Not that any of this will be all that classic :P

I'm looking into this right now >.>

I also recall back in the day I had to eventually buy a SB16 Live or some nonsense as the built-in sound on my HP would crash the client at odd times. It was always a bitch when it happened when Slate hit my Bard lol. This was during... Velious, maybe. I don't recall exactly when it happened. But it's when i discovered the modem was part of the sound card module o.O

**edit** Sadly, that MP3 archive link was no longer good, so I don't have any reference material to work with =/

**edit again** I'm going to make a new thread about "new" music and leave this one alone so it doesn't get too derailed. however, I'm still open to working with MP3s to get them to sound closer to that AWE32 card if anyone is interested.

**edit part 3** I actually found a plugin that emulates the AWE32 card. But it costs $100 =( Found other GM plugins. $100+ lol.

**edit farce** Some of those MIDI tracks are a single track with several parts, others are broken up into several. =/

[Crover_CT99]

Originally Posted by grazulis [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I've been plugging away at this problem and here's an update.

This thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/po...opic_id=115730

reveals that someone had contact with the composer of EQ's music. At the bottom of the thread, somebody has reposted an MP3 archive which was presumably acquired straight from the composer. Inside the archive are renditions of the music which are about as good as I have ever heard.

It has been suggested that one can replace EQ's .XMI (midi) files with like-named MP3s. I'm not so certain of this. The other thing revealed in the above thread - which I determined for myself prior to stumbling upon that discussion - is that many (most?) of EQ's music is literally hidden away. For example, GL.XMI is EQ's battle music. If you play this file with Winamp, you'll hear the very battle music which Project 1999 plays whenever one enters combat. However, if you skip ahead 1/3rd into the tune (and again at 2/3rds), you will also hear the other two battle themes which Project 1999 does not play. These used to play randomly when entering combat. And there are a lot of examples of this... many tunes stored in a single .XMI file. Even the opening EQ theme itself is hidden halfway into FREPORTN.XMI.

For anyone who ever wanted the entire soundtrack in a reasonably accessible format, the above thread also includes a .MID pack which was created by isolating each of the parts hidden in the .XMI files and creating separate .MID files out of them. All one then needs is a midi player which does a better job than the built-in soundbank utilized by Windows.

But back to the issue of getting this great music to actually play in EQ.

This thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/po...opic_id=146016

makes apparent something which I never personally found out, as I quit EQ for good shortly after Luclin's introduction. Evidently, when the Planes of Power got released, EQ's music was changed for good. Many MP3s were introduced, and we have clear-cut file names like EQTHEME.MP3 and FREEPORT.MP3. I happen to have discovered the complete filelist of mp3s and looked it over. As it happens, there are far fewer individual tunes than what was made available via the .XMI system with its multiple tunes per file, and this may help explain anomalies such as the no-longer-random battle music. Would Everquest Titanium play these MP3s if they were present? Who knows.

I may someday decide to scratch an itch and get my old Velious installed so I can shanghai the eqgame.exe and use it to replace Titanium's eqgame.exe. Sure, there are plenty of reasons to expect this not to work, but just imagine if it would. No more "ebon crystals" in your inventory. Battle music would be properly random. Missing tunes would be back (just listen to those MP3s in the first linked thread)!

I'm glad you posted this link. I had found it a year or so ago and rejoiced at having a decent set of the original tunes.

I posted about this on the bug section awhile back, but it garnered no interest from the developers.

Anyway, to the OP, if you read the entirety of that post you linked, I believe someone posts a "remake" of either the Qeynos or FP bard guild music which is worth a listen.

[km2783]

Originally Posted by Crover_CT99 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm glad you posted this link. I had found it a year or so ago and rejoiced at having a decent set of the original tunes.

I posted about this on the bug section awhile back, but it garnered no interest from the developers.

Anyway, to the OP, if you read the entirety of that post you linked, I believe someone posts a "remake" of either the Qeynos or FP bard guild music which is worth a listen.

"And as a hommage to Jay: here is a sweet, reworked version of the old Qeynos Bardguild midi, done by Leif Chapelle aka Cobalt Katze on the VG forums: http://www.xs4all.nl/~treesong/bardguild.mp3 "

[YendorLootmonkey]

I replaced my combattheme1.mp3 with the "Princes of the Universe" song from Highlander. Sword battles are 10x cooler. I also replaced the death theme with the chorus from "Live and Let Die". That's as much playing around with the music as I have done. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[mgellan]

If you go to http://www.xs4all.nl/~treesong by itself you can see all the files he has, including EQmp3.zip ...

Regards,
Mg

[PearlJammzz]

Wow, these tunes are so much more...alive I guess you could say than what we normally hear. Any way to make these play like this with our current client? Perhaps w/ the secrets of faydwer client?

Would be awesome to be able to play mp3's for each zone/area. I imagine these are handled via the client though, and have nothing to do with server code?

[Gamkek]

I wish there were some way I could help with this! I want the original music so badly. Windows 7 does a poor, poor job of dealing with the MIDI files currently. The music often stutters or goes completely out of key. Other times there's just high-pitched squealing for 10-15 seconds and then it goes back to normal. Ugh, what a mess!

And none of it sounds nearly as good as it did on my old P2. Oh, the irony.

Anyway, if there's anything I can do to help, please let me know. Maybe we can all pitch in for the AWE32 so we can do this??

[Gamkek]

Originally Posted by mgellan [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

If you go to http://www.xs4all.nl/~treesong by itself you can see all the files he has, including EQmp3.zip ...

Regards,
Mg

Some of these .mp3s sound pretty spot on. I don't know how we can get the Titanium client to recognize these though. It's a shame the quality and quantity of music dropped after Kunark. The original EQ music was so immersive.

[PearlJammzz]

Some, like lavastorm, the game uses a .mp3 format file anyways. We could just swap this out, and it'd play these versions of the music [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.].

[km2783]

Originally Posted by Gamkek [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Some of these .mp3s sound pretty spot on. I don't know how we can get the Titanium client to recognize these though. It's a shame the quality and quantity of music dropped after Kunark. The original EQ music was so immersive.

just rename them and replace the MP3 files in your EverQuest directory.