Wii Music

Nice game, not so many great songs. Drum part is verg good, but forgotten.

Battle Of The Bands Wii

Great guitarhero game without buying a guitar. Some great indie music in country hiphop spanish rock and drumband

I made 1 3some mashup on yt , wanted to creatr more, but will not use original vids anymore.

Kaleidoscope PC

See kkaleidoacoop parts. Should I creatr an post with its name or in the series?

Dance DNA

I liked the title very much, dancing DNA strings seems quite interesting, well it's not. First the CD-Rom was missing an crucial file, so Dance DNA could not work ( lucky for me the customer support send me the missing DLL file), second: all visuals looked as poorly drawn 3D animals made out of strings and last: before Dance DNA let it move you first have to play the whole songs, otherwise it doesnt know how to moe it ! I tried a couple of times...and decided to use the visuals of (for example: ) Windows Media Player , which are made in realtime ( lots of choice too).

I tried to records its moves, but it didnot, maybe soneone tried better on yt 

Philips Music Module prgrams : Drum System

Its from Philips Germany I guess, just like Musicbox and Music Creator made by Computermates. Sorry not much to tell about Computermates, but they did a wonderfull job cresting these programs.

See also the post about the music module. This program was never sold in dutchy land. I would buy it without a doubt. It came from PHILIPS Germany.

Organic Art : an original music visualizer

Organic Art is just like Kaleidoscope but runs under Windows instead of MS-Dos (does anyone know what that is? Yes the big brother of MSX-Dos ofcourse...). You can make your own set of visuals and change the way they work, pretty cool huh? I am not sure the visual move on the rythm of music, but in Dance DNA I wasnt sure either, just enjoy the moving visuals and play some music.well the idea was good but just as in the past the simple computer generated creatures only move with the mouse and not with the music. I will upload a short video to show some of the visuals.Myguesss is my soundcard in my computer doesn't support Direct Sound of the old Direct X5 and 6 ( currently myWin10 runs  DirectX11), sad they did not use more then 1 methods to folllowjjng the music. I still have a printed mail of the support from hummingbird software who made Dance DNA ,cause on the official release CD thehh did not include a vital DLL file, without  it Dance DNA just crashed. 

I had raw footage of everg animation and some ambient musics 3x. Still editting needed to create a best of with a new version of those ambient sounds, by adding some drumloops.

Best of Benn danglish msx gamemusics

Earlier benn danglish in October last year. I knew the man very briefly. He was a real c64 guy wrote many tunes but in the ports of zx spectrum games of c64 games  also that was made  for msx including a port of music. Some fav of mine dead wish 3 auf wiedersehen Monty and venom strikes back. Lately I found out that not only benn but also a couple of David Withaker (lazy jones) c64 musics where converted for msx. Well most of these games where just ports from the zx spectrum ones. That why so many English gamex look so terrible, just like the spectrum ones. So msx was just another spectrum with a different name. Not a world standard.

Allready collected the msx games , now record and mix it.

Todd Rundgren - No World Order CD-Rom

No World Order CD-ROM by TR-i (or Todd Rundgren Interactive)

This music program tries to create songs by selecting a kind of mood you're in.
Because there are not much to chose from, most so-called songs are sounding
like somebody cut a few songs in parts of 10 seconds and play them randomly...
Yeah, hot stuff...
 
It's a very old Windows program, however when it came out, (1993 maybe, like the album with the same name), computer programs to make music were hard to find, so I don't want to criticize it a lot.


It started off with the cover of the CD and a soundscape with mashup with short pieces of the songs in a terrible order.
I thought the first time my CD-ROM player just crashed, next time it was just annoying.
Not the best way to start a music program.
 
After listening to parts of the whole CD, it was just the first track. Ugh.

The program does not have any mouse arrow, only by the colour changes or the changed shape on the buttons indicates you know what you are doing (most of the time you don't, trust me).
And because the program wants to run completely from CD-ROM, the "music" you make with this program is continuously stutter.
It sounded like a CD player with lots of power failures.
I got so angry I decided to make an ISO and run it.
That was a slight improvement. Not enough to play the music fluently.
So I copied all files of the CD-Rom and started it and I recorded my first attempt to create some sort of soundscape.
I found out if you do nothing, it plays the whole CD of New World Order, which is the basis of this music program.
The whole album seems to have only songs that were cut in 2 parts, some parts were good, some not.
Later I found out it was Todd Rundgren idea, so you could set your CD-player on shuffle and have every time a new New World Order mix to listen too.

At least one song really hit the spot with "Day Job" the only uptempo song of the album,
It comes an gets you with a pumping bassline, raw guitar riffs with lots of echoes, babytalk, the theme of The Twilight Zone.
Does humour belong in rock music? Yeah, it should.

Todd Rundgren may be the worst white rapper of the 90s, he pushed the message through the song and I like it a lot. Even the very misty video shows how many things Todd did on stage to make his concerts more enjoyable for the audiences like nobody else did at that time. Maybe even U2 used some Todd tricks for their concerts?

The artist himself (Todd Rundgren) was a little famous in those days, a real pioneer in interactive music and busy since the early 70s.
A bit like Peter Gabriel, who had better songs at that time...

I have searched on YouTube for some songs. it seems the genius himself (according to his fans) creates lots of (at first hearing) perfect pop-songs, which all change into the opposite of poppy.
Like he does not want to compose anything that may sound commercial.

He was also the producer of Bourgeois Tagg album YoYo (with their hit I don't mind at all),
that way I knew him already.

After I recorded more than 45 minutes to try to know the program and create a decent mix I let the video on my hard disk for more than 6 months. I had no time and no ideas.

Recently I got some spare time and after hearing the 2nd part of the intro song I developed 2 ideas, 1 video with intro track and credits (or the help page) and some videos with the best mix-parts of the 45 minutes session. 

When I finally got 5 videos uploaded I had learned some lessons:
1) If you want to make high resolution, you have to convert your video material to that resolution first
2) Animated title with a duration of 3 seconds is too short, use at least 5 seconds
3) Big fonts can be a bit off screen AFTER exporting, not in the editor, use fewer words.
4) Matching video and music exactly is impossible without good visual on the waveform of the audio, but almost will do the trick.

BTW Todd Rundgren released a year later (1994) also a New World Order lite with the 10 normal songs. Means to me, he did it only for commercial reasons...

 If you still interested: you can listen here to all the songs, well only 1 minute.

I found some footage of  the CD-I version of New World Order, where Todd is demonstration it, check out part 1 and 2 
And a short TV-story where Todd explains how his CD-I works and why he did it.

And an interesting fan-made mix (without the "Day Job") 
Nee more background story about New World Order? Look at 25

Other music stuff : Thomas Happ vs Sub Morphine - Trace Awakens at the Shoreline (Mashup)

I am proud to present to you Trace Awakens at the Shoreline, the first mashup made by my son Jeffrey (aka King ECHatron II). 

He likes electtonic music in general, but does not think in any genres. So he can enjoy retro-rock like Wolfmother and like older stuff like Rob Zombie. Enough said. 

The way he created this mashup is really special. He played a great side scroll shooter called Axion Verge with some great music and relased that one song had the same bassline as a beautiful song he found on YT channel of Electronic Gems of Sub Morphine.

And he decided to mashup these, cause even the BPM matched. 

He started his Audacity editor, cut and paste a little, added a fade out, 1 song was longer than the other....and wham... a new mashup was born. 

Maybe even creating a new music genre, it is Dark Synth Wave versus Chillwave. 

Or Chillout vs Industrial...

Jeffrey created a new title and artists names out of both tracks and send it to me by Skype. 

I think it's an amazing track that you won't forget.

 

Also I was amazed how he could create such a good mashup by simply using Audacity, which is not the easiest program to create multi-track music. 

I decided to create a videomix of it, with some gameplay from Axion Verge and the logos of the game Axion Verge and that other composer Sub Morphine. 

Tried to keep it simple, I had to use 5 different video-editor, before I could produce the video.with VSDC free video-edotor and upload the result to YouTube.

 I forgot the link to VSDC free editor at YouTube, so I put it with the link for Audacity 

in this post and update YT description.

- Mixed/Produced by Audacity Download it for free at https://www.audacityteam.org/download/

- Video produced with VSDC Video Editor: Downlosd it for free at: http://www.videosoftdev.com/free-video-editor/download

Xplora 1 CD-Rom - Peter Gabriel

Let's begin with saying "There is no Xplora 2". You can stop reading here! 

Now I will continue for those who want something about "Xplora 1". 

Peter Gabriel is one of these artists who knows how to use new technologies.
So when the CD-Rom games starting to become very populair, he not only release a CD called "Us" and also a CD-Rom with a musical multimedia experience, with video clips from his singles of the CD "Us", some musical games, puzzles, photo's, sounds and other interesting info.

With the CD-Rom came a beautiful book with more stuff to read,  more pictures, photos like on another magazine ever.

I kept the book somewhere (in other words: I don't know where I put it) and the CD-Rom 

cause I liked the idea of a musical adventure, where you can just watch or explore.

When I bought it, my PC was not capable of running it (too slow) and when I got a faster PC, it won't run it, cause it used an too old version of Video for Windows. Yes, this CD-Rom was made when Windows 3.1 was all around and Windows 95 not yet to be released.

Now recently on my virtual Windows XP, it works a bit, except for the videos.

Lucky for me, others like it too and posted some videos of "Xplora 1".

It was also released for Apple Mac computers and Philips CD-I. Understandable, but CD-I was a very very bad system.

Of the whole CD-Rom, I like the video-clips of the songs of the album "Us" the most.

"Kissing That Frog", "Steam" and "Digging In The Dirt"is very fascinating to watch.

Yeah, I know "Steam" is just another "Sledgehammer", but almost as good.

I will leave you with a short video review and sort of play through by a proud owner of de CD-Rom.

And some videos of my fav songs of "Us" or "Xplora 1"

My Music Memories: The Hedgehog's Dilemma of 8bit bEtty

I post this song earlier on my Facebook (I forgot) and when I was looking to the video's ZooiTroep liked, I found this one again. It's a really sad song about 2 people, both too shy to talk to each other. Yeah, I'm still sky and doesn't like crowds full of people I don't know. I don't like being in the spotlights and when I had to talk in public I am still blushing.


Now something about the music, 8bit bEtty uses sounds MSX-ers are very familiar with, I am talking about the standard sound chip PSG. That's not all, he also uses male and female robotical voices (sort of text 2 speech) and let them sing along. 
It's really impressive and it makes the difference between other chiptune or bitpop artists.

This song "The Hedgehog's Dilemma" comes from the album "Fake the Bitters" and you can still buy it on bandcamp.com. 

I must say not all the songs are great, but you must listen the whole album for yourself to judge. And here comes the sad part, after the album "Fake The Bitters" 8bit bEtty stopped publishing.

According to his latest tweets he is in the game-industry. 
However I guess he uses an other alias then 8bit bEtty here.

Here the link to the album: "Fake the bitters" to listen.
If you move your mouse pointer over the titles you can click on lyrics too.

But for this track "The Hedgehog's Dilemma" I make an exception, here are the lyrics:

I am just a shy girl at heart
I wish I could say hi to you
why am I alone again tonight
when I am in a city filled with possibilities

I am just a shy boy at heart
and I know you expect me to say hi to you
I guess I'm afraid of what you'll say
so I guess I will read another book tonight by myself

And sometimes I wish things weren't this way
that I could change
but then I'd lose a sense of myself
Oh what a shame

I am always the girl alone at the show
I start to sweat when you say hello
I will make a reservation for one
I don't think that eating alone is fun

And sometimes I wish things weren't this way
that I could change
but then I'd lose a sense of myself
Oh what a shame

Someday I will find someone shy just like me
Someday I will find someone shy just like me
Someday I will find someone shy just like me
Someday
Someday


Someone shy just like you

Note:
About the title, here is a short explanation from YouTube user: my name is.
"the hedgehog's dilemma actually a metaphor . like, when it's cold, hedgehogs would like to cuddle but they kinda cant bc theyll hurt each other."

Bit Trip Complete (Mad Mix)

Finally the return of Mixmeister TnC. This time not another MSX Moonblaster Housemix, but a mix of music from the game Bit Trip Complete (Wii version). Or to be exact a mix made from the Bit Trip Soundtrack Sampler Audio CD that was included with the (2nd hand) Wii game. For those who don't  know Bit Trip Complete are a collection of 6 games you have to play following the rhythm of the music. The games itself are variations of classics like Pong, but there is also a nice platformer (Bit Trip Runner), dot eating game like agar.io (Bit Trip Void) and an oldschool rail shooter (Bit Trip Fate).

I played a free demo of Bit Trip Beat once via Wii Store Channel, but the game seems a little boring so I never bought the whole game. But recently I found the game and 5 others in a store Game Mania. It was called Bit Trip Complete and had also an Audio CD, so I bought it without any doubt .

After playing the games I listen to the Audio CD and was a bit disappointed by the music, yes, it was amazing sometimes and sometimes incredibly boring. I decided to put the best parts together in 1 mix so I didn't have to listen to the Audio CD again.

Why it's called Mad Mix ?
My son told me he played all his favorite music on YouTube at 1.25x speed even the newest ones from Monstercat. I thought it was a good idea so I speed up all Bit Trip tracks of the Audio CD to 1.25 and the results were better than I expected.
I didn't know the tracks that well and I decided to let Mixmeister mix on BPM, start slow, speed up the BPM to the max and cooling down to the end of the mix.
These are the 2 reasons I called this one Mad Mix.

I finished the mix in maybe 8 hours (including converting/cutting/speedup audio tracks and smoothing the mix output) and it was quite a long mix of more than 23 minutes.
I had some bad experiences with creating playlists on Mixcloud (it doesn't allow you to use more than 3 or 4 tracks of the same Artist) and this mix was Bit Trip material only !!!
I decided to upload it to YouTube instead, cause tracklist is not necessary and I couldn't find any good Bit Trip (re) mix.

Well I hate to watch more than 5 minutes of the same picture and 23 minutes of my mix should be a torture. I got the idea of creating a video with random clips of the games from Bit Trip Complete during the playing of the Mad Mix.

That was a real bad idea, after I recorded plenty of videos with gameplay I let the video editor split the videos into scenes and speed up every scene to 1.3, cause 1.25 was not available. It took an enormous amount of time to generate it. Then I tried to choose no duplicate scenes during the 23 min, tough job cause I had more Mad Mix than the total duration of all the used scenes. On top of that the video editor cutted  he music off when it was out of scenes. But it got worse when during producing the video the editor stopped working and when it was produced had the wrong video format to add the music to it.

I almost gave up the idea of putting it on YouTube, but after I moved my project to a bigger and faster computer I finally could save the whole thing and upload it.

There is another story to tell about how I recorded the gameplay videos, maybe another time. I can tell you one thing: Dolphin emulator, an Xbox controller and a screencapture running from a USB external harddisk is not the best way to create gameplay videos...

Here is the YouTube link for the Mad Mix

DJ Station a music generating computerprogram

DJ Station of DATA BECKER is a really strange computer program, it can generate music in different styles, but you can on the fly change how the music sounds like. 

How ? By adding music samples, change filters and other settings like speed or mood. 

DJ Station created an impressive number of so called DJs that generate some kind of style and mood. 

It possible to create your own DJ, but you cannot add your own picture in it or generate how the DJ should look like... that's what I miss the most in DJ Station. 

And they made a horrible bad looking icon  (see below)...

While it was designed for WIN 95/98, still it runs on Windows XP 

and higher, but cannot record/save/export the mix anymore.

With the right audio-/videograbber you can record the track and make a mp3 of it. 

 

What I like in DJ Station is you can interactive change the mix, while the DJ is playing his mix, you see every nod or switch move, crazy to see...

Because DJ Station is an old program it contajns music-styles we dont use anymore, 

like Cross-Over , Rave or Euro-House and the music or mixes it produced are very minimal and could easlily repeating itself, I like it any way. 

My bigest problem with DJ Station is mainly the vocals, mostly the female voices are annoying, boring and used too often. 

I made some tracks myself with DJ Station and upload them to Soundcloud, 

titled "Strong & Delayed".

See my other posts with the same title for more info... 

DJ Station was issued as an 2 CD-Rom package, mainly containing samples in wav format.

So installing all 15 (!) music styles will take a while...