Hot answers tagged music
31
You need an art lead and proper art style documentation. There are things like palettes to determine, plus various bits of example concepts, a lot of art terminology that clearly defines things to artists in ways that tech terminology clears things up for developers. A good art lead can define all these and make your consistent art style, and properly ...
25
No.
In most cases... also, I am not a lawyer, find one they help.
Arrangements of, and recordings of, specific performances of classical music are both copyrighted separately. This means that even if a piece in its original form is in the public domain, the piece itself is still someone's active intellectual property.
So, when can you use classical music?
...
11
You have two options:
1) The indirect route: Find sites that distribute music and put it there. See Where is quality paid game music? and Where can I find free music for my game?
2) The direct route: Find a project in development and talk to them directly. See "Finding a project" from here: Open Source game projects
11
Jonathan Blow licensed all of the music used on Braid from Magnatune.com (here's a post on his blog where he talks about it). So I was thinking that perhaps you could get an estimate of a reasonable price from their website. Here's their licensing information page and here's a sample page they provide that lets you estimate the price for licensing one song ...
9
I'll paraphrase my answer from Audio copyright questions (and I am Not a Lawyer :)
Note that this assumes you're in the US (or other Berne signatory countries), and in particular, Canada may be different, as was discussed.
It also assumes that when you say, "bought a song", you meant bought a copy from Amazon or somewhere - if you actually bought the ...
9
I don't see how being an indie developer changes the problem set other than probably having a smaller budget.
Your list of options probably fall something like this:
Have a sound guy on staff to do all custom stuff
Contract out a sound guy from one of the many sound studios
Get lucky and "know a guy" (online or in meatspace) who does music who will do it ...
8
http://www.footagefirm.com/stock-music/all-music.html
I've bought music from this group before.
They often have sales for large collections (~20 tracks, with 4 variants of each track including loopable 1 minute sections) going for $8.41, or short samples (~40seconds) going for ~$5.
Their collections are generally grouped by theme/atmosphere, with Scifi ...
8
Games need to provide feedback to the player to let them know what's happening. Chiefly feedback is provided in one of 3 ways:
visual feedback (graphics, flashes)
aural feedback (sounds)
tactile feedback (vibration/rumble)
(... maybe one day there'll be taste + smell feedback too)
Feedback can be given for aesthetic reasons as well as for practical ...
8
Neither being an indie developer, nor releasing game for free, doesn't grant you some additional rights implicitly. You can either need to have agreement with rights owner, or use music that is in public domain or other license (like CC license) that allows some sort of free usage.
Also as Markus correctly mentioned in comment, Public Domain is a tricky ...
8
The question "How can I work with an arbitrary amount of artists, yet maintain artistic consistency across the entire game?" cannot be solved with a one-size-fits-all answer - it is dependant on your specific project. If you edit your question and provide more details on your specific problem, then perhaps we can help with your problem of scale and ...
7
Well, solitaire (that comes on Windows machines) doesn't have background music.
Despite that, I think if you can find a decent background music loop that fits the feel of the game and is not obnoxious (i.e. can the user tell when the song is starting over again? and again? and again?), then you should add it. Just be sure to add an option to turn it off.
7
As far as I know: as long as you pay for the software (not pirate it by, for example, downloading it via bit torrents) you can use it.
However, for example, if in GarageBand you use existing audio loops/samples, you may have to check for clearance with the creator or owner of the rights to the samples.
6
I'd say games should always have sounds. In 90% of cases they add to the experience. Have an option to mute it and then you will be catering for the people who don't like it as well.
Just as an example Canabalt is a game that uses music very well.
6
I am no music guy. But, have you heard of FL Studio & its free alternate LMMS - Linux MultiMedia Studio
Sorry, dont know much about it. Its better if you talk to musician.
You can give it a try here http://music.stackexchange.com
6
The MediaPlayer in XNA has always had a short delay when looping songs and I haven't seen any way to resolve the issue. What is your target platform? You could consider using XACT if you are targeting the Xbox or Windows as it doesn't have the same issues as the MediaPlayer API.
I'd recommend against using SoundEffect (as recommended by Sprunth) to play ...
6
If you're a beginner, I would say the following is required:
Computer
$100 midi keyboard from best buy
Garage band
very good headphones for mastering
Watch a bunch of youtube videos of people writing piano rolls and mixing in garage band
If you're just learning digital sound, I wouldn't rush out and buy logic, protools, and reason with $1000 studio ...
6
You can get the current username with:
Environment.UsernName
But if you were going to use it to construct a path to the Music folder, there's an easier way:
Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyMusic)
Here's a list of all the folders you can get this way.
6
Distributing copyrighted music without a license from the copyright owner is a violation of copyright, and is illegal in most parts of the world.
Yes, it's still a violation of copyright even if you distribute it for free.
Yes, it's still a violation of copyright even if you credit the artist.
Yes, it's still a violation of copyright even if you hold your ...
6
Sure you can, it's just not trivial to get it sounding "nice".
I don't know how to do it in Linux, but if you can play a PCM buffer, all you have to do is fill it with whatever you want.
So supposing your buffer is set to play in monaural, signed 16-bit samples, at 44100 samples per second, creating a pure (sinusoidal) A4 sound (440 Hz) is as simple as
...
5
Just to add to some of the existing answers. As many have already pointed out, using a copyrighted song without securing a proper sync license would be considered a copyright infringement and can get you into trouble.
Getting sync license for a popular song can be pretty pricey or even impossible (unlike mechanical licenses, sync licenses are not compulsory ...
5
In all honesty, it's probably down to what sounds best at the lowest bitrate.
So if you had music at 192kbps but you could still get it sounding decent without a whole lot of quality loss at, say, 64kbps, then you've got no reason not to use the 64kbps version.
It might be worth having a bunch of different bitrates of the same song and see which "sounds" ...
5
This largely depends on how you intend to use the music in this and future related products, how valuable (often gauged by popularity) the music is, and whether you want to buyout the rights or work out a royalty deal.
Here's a link with some general info: http://www.ascap.com/Home/Music-Career/articles-advice/ascapcorner/corner16.aspx
5
If the artist has entered into an agreement with a royalties collection agency - whether for the recording, or the songwriting - then you can't use their music without a licence from the relevant agency or agencies in order to use the music. This is because the artist has assigned their rights to the collection agency, and is no longer legally allowed to ...
4
Your question can be broken down into 2 components:
1. How do I generate musical sounds and timbres, and then play that through the speaker?
This is even a 2-parter:
1.1. How do I generate any kind of sound and play it back through the speaker?
Audio data is frequently represented and processed in 32 bit floating point numbers ranging from -1.0 to 1.0, ...
4
I wouldn't say music is critical, but good music on any platform can greatly enhance the player's experience. The most important consideration with respect to music is that the music be appropriate--it should fit the game, and it should be somewhat subtle; it should not be too distracting. I would argue that poorly chosen music can easily be worse than no ...
4
The soundtrack for the original Unreal Tournament took the form of tracker music, which packages together both audio samples and sequencing information for triggering those samples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_%28music_software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file
You might also look to the demoscene for inspiration. Soundtracks created in ...
4
It always depends on the underlying license, so you need to make sure the tune you want to reuse in yours allows that kinda stuffs.
For example, some Creative Common licenses allows other composers to reuse them but you always have to mention the original composer obviously somewhere.
So in a nutshell no general answer for that kind of questions. And most ...
4
It looks like you have roughly the same problem as described here: http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/44169/419462.aspx
The solution there seems to be the following.
In the loading screen of your level do the following for all the songs you would like to play in the level:
MediaPlayer.Play(backgroundSong);
MediaPlayer.Pause();
This way your songs ...
4
Don't use a random pattern, people would like to use their muscle memory to play a song the same every time.
I suggest you define the pattern for the entire song, and give each position a difficulty rating. The most difficult version of the song would include all the difficulties, say 1-5. Where as the medium version of the song would contain all the ...
4
This is a very interesting question.
To analyze music, it is important to know exactly how one song differs from the next.
Of course, music is a very abstract art field with a lot of incomplete and conflicting opinions and elements, but here is a short list of things that are generally agreed upon as making one song different from the next:
Tempo/Rhythm. ...
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