Messages

It is probably a good idea to remove MP3 as an allowed format for this bit, since there are no looping MP3 files. Mpeg layer-3 compression has the peculiarity of adding a tiny bit of silence at both the beginning and the end of the file, which will produce a very distinctive hiccup whenever it loops. Yes.

Well, although there might be a small hiccup like that when dealing with mp3 files, I'm sure developers are aware of it. But the "Music loops" bit is more a way of telling that the rhythm matches.

A good example of this is with MIDI music for JavaME. Very few mobile phones are capable of performing a smooth loop. So a MIDI that loops isn't actually loopable on a mobile phone. Therefor artists use "tricks" to make this non-smooth loop less apparent - and these tricks = "Music loops" + "Optimized for JavaME" in my opinion.

Examples:
Mobile game with music that tries to loop, but has this rather big hiccup because the phone can't do it.
vs
Mobil game with music that uses this flaw to add a break in the music that sounds like it's supposed to be there.

So tell me, which one of those could be marked as "Music loops"? 


Anyway, I do see your point with the mp3 files. I can easily hear where the music loops in most Flash games, but it's the best Flash can do, so we live with it. What about players? Can't these players take care of this issue?

I noticed there is no "forgot password" option on the login page...took me ages to remember my login details!

It's on my todo-list.

Well, I think being able to mark some music as completely freeware so they don't need to contact you would be nice.  I was more interested in being able to stop the newsletter since I tend to check sites regularly and don't like notices .

How about you type it in your profile or in the note field of the track (or file if you prefer), and I change the red text to "...must contact author, unless otherwise stated in artist profile or track info"?

Both . 

Hmm, I get the newsletter part, and I'll add that, but if game-developers can't request a track, then how can they use it? Even for freeware, most artists prefer to be asked, e.g. to avoid their music in ethically / politically wrong productions. Therefor it's a general rule of IGM.

You'd like to be able to give anyone permission to just download and use your track regardless of the production, and without contacting you at all?

A game-developer recently asked me to do a more general contact form, instead of having to request a track in order to reach the artist. You would also like to be able to turn such a contact-form off?

A profile option to turn off email notices would be nice.

Do you mean newsletters, or when game-developers wants to request a track?

Thanks for your reply EldKatt. Much appreciated.

I think your list of genres seems quite arbitrary and limited. Some of them are very specific, others are exceedingly generic, and some are ill-defined or obscure. If I had to categorize all imaginable game music into just 21 discreet fields, you wouldn't see "Christmas" or "post-industrial" in there, nor would you see "popular music", which could semantically overlap with (or contain) quite a few of the other categories. I'd like to see a more thought-through and systematic method for this categorization.

The genres are supposed to be main genres, as in very wide and open - not detailed restricted ones. They are mainly copied from other soundbank sites and picked from Wikipedia. It's quite possible that it needs to be revised, since I'm no expert at all in that area, and I'm very open to suggestions about how the list of genres should be like in your opinion. So please do mail me such a suggestion to mr_lou@vip.cybercity.dk
I was puzzled by that "Popular music" myself, but included it because it was listed on other similar sites.

I see the "Christmas" of course has to be removed as well, and replaced by a mood tag I think.

You're absolutely right to move chiptune from genre to tag, but I think you might actually benefit from turning all of these into tags, simply because no matter how much you improve on your choices (which you can and should do in any case), there will always be room for plenty of overlap. Of course, it might seem that all I'm doing is pointing out weaknesses in the current selection of genres, but such problems of categorization will always exist, and by admitting right away that you can't ever think up a perfect set of genre categories and just turning them into tags, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble.

It's never easy for the musician to put his/her music into a genre. That's also why I want the genres to be very main, as in the higher level. And it's also easier for the game-developer to search. Most people doesn't know half the genres that exists anyway and wouldn't know what to search for.
So, main genres only, and the rest is done by searching by mood tags (and later possibly also game-style).

OK, another area. I think you'd have a lot to gain from having a set of tags that describes "instrumentation". For any music made for a particular set of instruments (whether recorded or synthesized), it's very helpful to be able to search by such criteria. Tags for particular instruments, for particular types of instrument groupings, or a combination, I'm not so sure. Maybe discussion will ensue and forum magic fix the problem.

Tags for instruments might be implemented next time. For now I think it'll be too big considering the small size of the site, and I'd like to focus on the genres, moods and additional new file tags this time.

["Chip music"]

Hy all

It's time to implement an improvement for IndieGameMusic.com. I want to add tags to the files there, and I need your suggestions to what tags there should be.

Currently, a musician can add a track. This track can be available in multiple fileformats, such as MIDI, MOD and/or MP3. See an example here.
The track itself is marked with a genre and some mood tags. This genre and the mood tags are therefor put on all files for the track also.
Now, what I want to do is to add additional tags for each file, and I've come up with the following suggestions so far:

"Chip music"
I want to remove "Chip tune" from the Genre box in the search form, and add this tag for each file instead. In the above example, only the XM and MP3 file is actual chip music, while MIDI and SMAF obviously can't be chip music.

"Optimized for filesize and compability on the JavaME platform"
One that would be really useful for JavaME developers. Used to only show MIDI files that are infact deliberately optimized for the JavaME platform. Other MIDI files may also work on the JavaME platform, but most likely wasn't intended to by the musician.

"Loop"
Tells whether the track loops or not. Useful for Flash developers who always wants mp3 files that does a smooth loop. Also useful when in search of MOD or XM files that loops infinitely. This tag will replace "Loop part" in the category box (which isn't visible at the moment because no musician has added a loop part).

Some other suggestions for tags:
"4-chan Protracker compatible MOD"
"Has vocals / lyrics"
"Instrumental"
"Acoustic music"

That's what I have so far. I'm very much interested in hearing from you game-developers what would be useful for you to search for. What do you think of the above suggestions? Useful or not? Do you have other suggestions for tags that'll make life easier for you when searching for music for your game?

Thanks for any input.

Nice job, I've registered & logged in, but there are no new menu items to click, just the original 4.

Yea, there has been a coding error today, but it's fixed now.
Sorry 'bout that.

I've been to the site and it looks promissing and a very interesting idea. There's not many files if you pick all the options you have avaiable but it's only in the start and authors should upload their files soon.
thank you for it

Great that you like it.

I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on the search function from other game-developers as well, so I think this site has a lot of potential. Spread the word, so we can build up a library.

Also, if you'd like to contribute otherwise, here are some banners you can put on your website:

Targeting the musician:
http://www.indiegamemusic.com/banners/igmbanner468x60-target-musicians.png

Targeting the game developer:
http://www.indiegamemusic.com/banners/igmbanner468x60-target-developers.png

And a tiny one.
http://www.indiegamemusic.com/banners/igmbanner88x31.png

Thanks

Alrighty then.

The site is now online!

http://www.indiegamemusic.com

You can search for a lot of stuff, like license types, filetypes, price, bpm, duration, filesize, polyphony, channels, genre and mood.

Now it just needs to build up a library. 

Feedback appreciated.

I guess I'll post this old thing

http://www.tindeck.com/audio/file/vowi-actingtest.mp3

Have to agree with the others. That's groovy!
I'd like to use a part of it to end one of my tunes one day. The part that goes "This is not at all what I wanted. This is the exact opposite of what I wanted! I wanna go home..."   LOL   Really funny, could be great to end a track like that. I would credit you of course.
Anyway, might PM you some day to ask if you're interested. :-)  Meanwhile you could check out the quality of my music to find out if it's good enough for ya. www.dewfall.dk

This doesn't sound too bad at all to me, I'd probably sign my details up It could be very useful for people looking for game music I'm sure.

Well I sure hope so.    But it depends on how the end result looks like, so I'm spending a lot of time trying to figure out the most optimal solution for all (including myself). Currently I'm thinking that artists probably don't want to upload their music, but instead just input a URL to somewhere they already host their music. Regardless of how it'll be, I'm also thinking about restricting these URL's to direct files only. That means, when we click a track we want to listen to it - we do not want to just open another page where we again have to click play.... or do we?

Other than that, I'm just interested to know of your success in the mobile-phone music stuff because its an area I've been interested in breaking into for a long time but not really known how.

Depends on how you define success. 
It's a rather recent section of my page, and not many people know about it. Also have a look at the prices. They are extremely low, yet I haven't sold a whole lot. Apart from one bigger order from Sony Ericsson, it's been mostly small indie companies, and probably half of them doing freeware games.
So if you mean financial success, then not much to report.
But I like doing it, and I think I have success in finding methods on how to create and improve these MIDI files, and eventually - especially when IndieGameMusic.com gets up - more game-developers will know about it.
Doing MIDI for Java ME is very much about analyzing each note, and consider if it's important or not. Each byte counts, especially for developers wanting to support older phones. It's also important to stick with few effects, otherwise it might not work at all. If you want to dig into it, you can find more tips and tricks in this tutorial I wrote.

Anyway, good luck with the website!

Thanks!    If only the domain would go through so I can get started.

I am a game-developer on the Java ME platform (mobile phones), and we're slowly planning on doing Flash games in the future as well. See our site at www.lublu.dk
I am also working on a little adventure game in AGS with the girlfriend. That's why I came here.

I am also a musician, with 20+ years of experience on various platforms and tools. See my site at www.dewfall.dk

In this thread here at AGS forums, I'm addressing game-developers. Musicians please read this letter instead:
http://www.ctgmusic.com/topic.php?id=8664

I'm not interested in participating, myself as a composer

8. Personally no, I wouldn't use it. I'm not making games, I'm making music!

Thanks for the long reply. I have replied your post at CTG Music in order to keep the discussions separated.

You are aware, I hope, that most indie developers have a zero budget?

Yes, that's exactly why this is a good idea. You see, the problem is that when a game-developer asks a musician for music, the musician has to spend at least 2-3 days creating it. As far as I know, no indie game-developer wants to pay a musician for 2-3 days work. And the musician doesn't want to be ripped of either. He especially don't want to give away his music for free, if the game-developer is making money on the game.

But many musicians are doing tracks all the time. Why not put these tracks on display, offering them for resale at a very low price? That's what I've been doing with my own MIDI stuff, offering them to Java ME developers at my J2ME Music section, and that has been working out fine. It is this section I now want to expand into offering more formats, and since I'm going to create such a system for myself anyway, I might as well open up for other musicians also.

I'm posting here to ask you as game-developers, what would you like in such a system? I know that Adventure Game Studio is very flexible when it comes to music, since it can handle both MID, MOD, XM and MP3. As a game-developer on the AGS platform, you therefor don't have any real restrictions with music really.
I'm thinking that in your case, you would probably like to be able to search for music in all those formats, so that the search-result would display music in either one of those 4 formats - you don't really care what the format is anyway, right?
That tells me that I have to implement some way of selecting all 4 formats, and not just one of them, and search result should then display all tracks whose format is among the chosen ones.
But game-developers that are aiming at porting their game on multiple platforms (e.g. mobile phone and Flash would require a MIDI and MP3/WAV version of the same track) might want another search-function; i.e. one that lets them search for tracks that are available in multiple formats. (As a game-developer, you might not be allowed to create your own MP3 version of a MIDI. That depends on decisions the musician makes).

It is simple things like this you can help me help you with here in the early beginning of this project.

[The idea]

Hello fellow game-developers

I'm writing you because I'm creating a site at www.indiegamemusic.com which I plan to become a link between indie game developers and musicians. This letter is an invitation to you as an indie game-developer, to participate in the design phase with your suggestions and ideas so that the site will end up being something you would like to use.

The idea
In short, I want to make it easy for the indie game-developers (you) to find good music for your games, free for freeware games and cheap for resale. A few steps I have in mind so far, is that you
    * go to indiegamemusic.com
    * click "Search", and input your search criteria
    * listen to results and find contact information to the artist

Your search criterias may be
    * a specific format (mmf, midi, mod, xm, s3m, mp3, ogg etc)
    * a specific license (free for freeware? available for non-exclusive resale? available for exclusive resale?)
    * max file size
    * style
    * category (music, sound-scape, sound-effect, loop part)
    * max channels or polyphony
    * max price
    * maybe preferred bpm

So... That's the idea. What do you think? If this sounds like an interesting project to you, feel free to participate with ideas and feedback at mr_lou@vip.cybercity.dk

Some of the things I'd like some feedback about is
    * how should payment happen? Paypal? Bank-transfer? Game-developer contacting artist and agreeing their own method of payment?
    * what stuff would you like to be able to search for? are there some of the above mentioned search criterias you don't need? why?
    * what formats are you mostly interested in, and why?a
    * and of course: do you think you'd use such a tool like IndieGameMusic.com?



Sincerely,
Roald Strauss
Mr.Lou / Dewfall Productions
www.dewfall.dk
www.lublu.dk