Tali'Zorah knows that even in the future, corded headphones are the way to go.

I really enjoyed Mass Effect 2, so much so that I like to imagine talking to people with a choice selector near the bottom of my vision. I usually choose paragon options but I know the usefulness of a well placed renegade response. Be careful with the interrupts though!

Like many good games, I find myself drawn to the soundtrack as a way of reliving our times together. I went searching for it but unfortunately they only released it in MP3 and M4A formats so far.

Call me a snob but I think our future should be filled with upgrades and that means something better than or equal to the sound quality of a Compact Disc.

No worries though because with a bit of patience you too can…

Make your own Mass Effect 2 Soundtrack

These instructions assume you are using the PC version of the game.

• Download
  • Mass Effect 2 .AFC extractor | mirror
  • Audiokinetic Wwise RIFF/RIFX Vorbis to Ogg Vorbis converter | mirror
  • Extract, Convert and Rename scripts.
• Unzip everything into a new folder.
• Copy “C:\Games\Mass Effect 2\BioGame\CookedPC\*Music.afc ” to the new folder.
  • Your path may be slightly different depending on where you installed the game.
• Run “Extract, Convert.bat”
• Run “Rename.vbs”

Epilogue

Now you can enjoy 508 pieces of Ogg Vorbis encoded music while you wait for EA to release a proper Compact Disc.

Oh and special thanks to Extirpator for the original instructions on how to accomplish this.

There are too many good songs to choose from so here are some of my favorites.

• Angel Witch
  • Angel Witch
• Anvil
  • Tag Team
• Black Sabbath
  • Children of the Grave
  • Symptom of the Universe
• Brocas Helm
  • Cry of the Banshee
• Budgie
  • Zoom Club
• Crimson Glory
  • Queen of the Masquerade
• Dragonforce
  • Through the Fire and Flames
• Judas Priest
  • The Hellion, Electric Eye
• Manowar
  • Die For Metal
• Motley Crue
  • Dr. Feelgood
  • Kickstart My Heart
• Nitro
  • Machine Gunn Eddie
• Ozzy Osbourne
  • Mr. Crowley
• Scorpions
  • Blackout
• Tenacious D
  • Master Exploder

Seems like a long list until you realize that there are 107 songs which when played end to end will shred your soul for up to 8 hours and 40 minutes! I haven’t experienced such an epic soundtrack since the seven disc Grand Theft Auto: Vice City OST.

The problem is… you can’t really buy the Brütal Legend soundtrack.

With a bit of patience, equipment and software you can however, make your own.

How to roll your own Brütal Legend Soundtrack

I’m going to be very specific about my own hardware here but the concept is certainly applicable to a very wide range of setups.

PlayStation 3

Plug in an optical audio cable to your PS3.

Settings >Sound Settings > Audio Output Settings

Choose Optical Digital, use the defaults for Linear PCM and save your settings.

Load Brütal Legend.

Change your sound sliders so everything is muted except for music.

Load your latest save, summon the druid plow and then press up on the direction pad to get to the built-in music player.

Computer

Plug in the optical audio cable from your PS3.

I’m using an Audigy Platinum eX since it has a nice breakout box with all sorts of connectors.

Change your recording source to Optical In, S/PDIF or some other similar terminology.

The official Creative drivers would only allow me to listen to the optical in so I had to switch to the kX Audio Driver for recording. Bit of a hassle but the kX software does unlock a lot of special abilities.

Fire up Audacity or your favorite audio editor.

Make sure you recording device is set to the optical port and then change your default sample rate to 48000 Hz.

Hit record and then play whatever song you want to capture on the PS3.

Export your recording to your favorite audio format like FLAC, AAC or MP3.

Bonus Tips

Make sure to unlock all the songs you want to capture before starting this endeavor. The Brutal Legend Item Map by Achievement Hunter makes this task bearable.

Make sure to stay in the druid plow when recording otherwise your audio will become positional to the vehicle.

Recording level too low? Try normalizing to -1.5 dB before you save.

Epilogue

Video game music can be infectious, repetitious, evocative or just plain fun. No matter your reaction, listening to game music can be the best link to your memories of playing them.

Like that one time in Seventh Saga at 3am when I kept dying and that @#$%^ battle music was drilling a hole through my skull and … *EXPLOSION*

The pesky asterisk means that not every song is available. Fortunately, my taste in music is as varied as my taste in underwear and a subsequent search led to the enchanting and technically excellent Gopher by Yma Sumac. Her vocal range causes me to shiver with the utmost respect.

The quality of the mp3 encoding is good (>200 vbr), the ID3 tags are perfect and it even includes a 600 pixel image of the album it comes from. I just wish someone would sell the same breadth of songs in lossless format. The company that did would receive a great many thousands in funds from a long night of impassioned purchases. Still, the rare treat of purging something from my “Dark” music collection while enhancing my legal sonics is a welcome occurrence.

For now, I think I’ll just keep myself entertained via Weird Music until the industry catches up with my digital needs.

The Life Aquatic is about a washed up Jaq Cousteau type figure who loses his best friend while filming a documentary. He boldly proclaims that after being a drunkard for one day that he will embark on this quest to kill the thing that got his friend. His oddball team ends up following along with some new members including his recently reunited son, a pack of interns seeking school credit and a pregnant report. Hilarity ensues soon after of course.

There are a lot of mini-memorable moments that I’m sure I’ll be reliving with Parr for the next few days. Plus the Ping Island/Lightning Strike Rescue Op tune by Mark Mothersbough is so infectious I think it will stay with me eternally.

The Life Aquatic is one of those movies that I can see myself championing although I think it would be folly to think that everyone would like it.

It can be slow, demented and awkward but it is very amusing none the less. I give it 4 out of 5 smegs, which um… in this case should be considered good.

Don’t forget to check out The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou site for previews, wallpapers and other goodies. It’s quite the perfect use of flash, video and other yummy technologies.

An hour of searching online for the song turned up nothing but preview clips. Ten seconds (literally!) of searching on DC++ found this audible gem.

That’s right. You may have heard about Dance Dance Revolution (one of my all time favorite games along with Dune II and Sam & Max) but you haven’t HEARD nothing yet.

Karaoke Revolution! Yes! Sing into your PS2. Use your falsetto. Sing like a muppet. Do Weird Al lyrics instead of the normal ones. The skies the limit when you open up yourself to social embarrassment.

I personally enjoy making up alternate lyrics on the spot. It’s a lot like rapping, you have to come up with a rhyme and quick. Plus, it better flow with your previous lines or it’s not going to flow.

I had Parr laughing her butt off tonight in case you were wondering.

So, I had a blast, sonically maimed some songs, got a few platinum albums (mostly when I sing Bizarre Love Triangle, love that one) and almost blew out my voice.

My voice is only level 1 right now but it’s gaining xp really fast. I’m sure eventually it will be harder to gain levels or even catch up to Parr since she started her character with Chorus Class skill.

Speaking of new music, the item currently distracting me is the very excellent Metamorphoses by Jean Michel Jarre. The music can be considered New Age or Electronic and uses all electronic samples which the occasional cool voices/quotes thrown in. Not your typical dance hall music though, it’s something higher. The emotions run deeper yet the music tapestry itself can be very simple. Perhaps its the Jean Michel Jarre’s clean sound that always entranced me. It’s the kinda music that can put me in a trance and always helps me code / reflect on life / relax / think new things and more.

I’ll be savoring this album for the next few days playing it perhaps even donning headphones for that extra bit of sound escape. For this I thank you Jarre, you have been a close part of my music life since I first started listening to you as a very young and troubled teenager. How far we have come together.

I’ve been growing weary of mp3 over the years, the annoying id3 tag format but mostly the fact that FhG (the creator of mp3) wants to charge for it’s use.

So what’s my new audio format of choice? Why Ogg Vorbis of course. It’s open source, very efficient (especially at lower bit rates), supports more than 2 audio channels (think 5.1 surround sound or more!), has a killer fish logo and best of all it’s starting to get supported on new hardware devices coming out. Really a no brainer from any company producing a digital media player. It costs them nothing to license all they have to worry about is software which is open source anyway.

I’ve been a fan of Ogg Vorbis for at least 2 or more years but back then the time wasn’t quite right for me to re encode my whole collection. Maybe because I had just finished the very long (I’m talking more than one year) project to correctly tag all my mp3 files.

So now each day I’ll hopefully be grabbing a cd, opening up Exact Audio Copy, batch converting to Ogg with proper tags and lastly scanning in the cd covers to PNG (another great free format!) while savoring my new fresh digital songs. Mmm… musicalisious. *slurp*

I thought I had the pile of 50 some odd tapes finally beaten… when suddenly reinforcements from Parr’s room arrived. Another 25 tapes circled around me. I wiped blood from the side of my mouth and stared grimly at them. “Your going down… just give me a few weeks!”, I spat at the tapes.

Oh well, listening to hours and hours of classic Dr. Demento isn’t too bad. Plus we have saved a lot of really wacky and rare pieces. We’ll even post some clips for ya all later when the last tapes are saved.

Odn makes waving motions at the lost and lonely tapes scattered around the room. “Come quickly little ones, the digital savior is here.”

Happy little tapes make cute noises as the waddle over to the benevolent computer, their new home.

The project started when I was thinking about hosting my old mod collection so that others could enjoy it. I wanted to make it a bit more informative than a directory listing though. I wanted to display the song title from inside the file, channels and file size.

After reading up on the mod file format and opening my mind to new concepts, I did just that. I created a nice little php script that could open and parse the mod file format and return the info I wanted. But wait… there was more goodies buried in the format. Things like the sample list which frequently contains messages from the author plus there was the holy grail, estimating the song length.

I kept working on more features each night, after a bit I was able to read the sample list messages, sample size, loop info and more. Things were going really well and I was learning a lot of new programming skills reading through these binary files. I decided that I would try to loop through all the pattern data and figure out how long each song is. What a quest it would be.

I started our reading the first note position then move on to different channels, rows and then finally patterns. I kept adding new functionality each night. An order reader, recording speed/bpm changes, delay effects, order jumps, pattern jumps and eventually odd song loops. It took me countless hours of work and quite a few major code changes along the way. Each problem brought with it more puzzles and eventual enlightenment when I figured out what was going on.

I can truly say I feel more like a programmer now more than ever. I’ve taken my lust for knowledge applied to to my beloved music collection and learned a lot of stuff along the way. I feel one step closer to my ultimate dream of becoming a video game programmer. I don’t know how long it will take or if I’ll even be successful but I know I’ll enjoy the quest and I will make a video game one day.

So without further ado please check out the new Music section which contains over 200 mod songs. Enjoy!

So what was the real length of the song as reported in a full mod file player such as Winamp? Yep, you guessed it. 4:12 minutes! Woohoo!

I feel like a programmer now more than ever. I took on a massive challenge and it payed off big time. I also learned a lot along the way including a better understanding of binary+hexadecimal formats, time calculations, C code and an intimate understanding of the mod file format. Oooh sexy.

Music is something I’ve always been in love with and one of the few things I have a really good memory for. To be to use my new programming skills to build a system for sharing that music makes me feel quite giddy inside.

So, what’s next on the agenda? Forging the last few bits of code to handle advanced features like “position jump” and “pattern delay”. These effects are not used in every mod song but I want to create a really complete reader than can tackle my whole collection.

Once those bits are done it’s on to code optimization (I already have some good ideas on this) and beautification before finally launching the new music section.

It’s funny how this litte self created project turned from a simple title/sample listing to a full fleged mod reader.

Ah the passion, she is back.