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What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

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What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby BonsaiTreehouse » Fri Jan 15, 2021 11:20 am

Mr. soundtrack-express guy here again, recently been jumping around some of the old GeoCities/AngelFire fansites, hoovering up all the downloadable midi tracks that would play in the background when you visited certain pages and converting them into playable mp3s.

So far, I've collected six: 'labyrinth', 'heretic', 'moody', 'tales', 'graveyard' and 'roth'.

I also noticed from the old 'MarrowProductions' gallery, two old link icon images both saying "midi archive", which is where I presume these and many other similarly used midi files were being kept for preservation's sake:

http://www.marrowproductions.com/other/ ... LOGO40.GIF
http://www.marrowproductions.com/other/ ... enterc.gif

I've been searching in vain for this directory through good-old Wayback Machine and have come up with nothing else. If anyone here knows where those midis are linked or even has direct download access to all those midis, I could make it publicly available on YouTube/Dropbox alongside all the other soundtrack rips I've provided over the months.

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated :)
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby DarkWolff » Fri Jan 15, 2021 3:36 pm

Marr0w may have copies on them. I'll ping him and see if he can post them.
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby marr0w » Sat Jan 16, 2021 1:43 pm

Whoa. Things I never thought anyone would ever ask for again. I should warn you that those midis weren't from any of the Nightmare/Atmosfear games, it was just the stuff we used to use on our websites. TECHNICALLY the pages are online, but I'd have to poke at them to make them work again...

...and remember what program I was using...

...and remember how to get back into the website...

...and then cringe at missing image files and incorrect file names..

...and rename a bunch of stuff...

Okay, http://www.marrowproductions.com/other-old/midi/MIDI01.HTM lives once again!!! I could have bypassed all that and just sent you the audio files, but honestly most of them are just labeled MIDI1, MIDI2, etc... at least now you have some kind of naming. I also spent the time to listen to everything and update the listed song names where I could. There's technically an extra midi hidden in the image at the top as a joke, but I don't think Duvet by Boa from the Serial Experiments Lain soundtrack belongs anywhere in this. That said, I made sure it worked too.

I'm not sure if you're just after the old Other Side midis or just old midis in general but I've got about a thousand or more (mostly sorted) I could pack up if you want them too? I generally don't delete anything and as small as they are I kinda keep forgetting they exist these days. (29MBs for the whole collection) Just let me know.
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby BonsaiTreehouse » Sat Jan 16, 2021 2:23 pm

He lives!

Great to be chatting with you at last Marrow, and thank you very much for the effort of getting all those MIDIs back in one place! Discovering and reaming through all these years of fandom history is so fascinating for someone who was born two years after the first game was released lol

In terms of the MIDIs themselves, I’m mainly after the more original(?) songs, as in, not based on or a cover of a pre-existing piece. Hope things are holding up well on your end! (I also noticed your comment on my first soundtrack rip video too! heh)

:D
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby marr0w » Sat Jan 16, 2021 3:39 pm

Yeah, unfortunately most of the midis I have are someone covering an existing piece. They where cheaper and safer to collect than CD music and we where too young and dumb to really care about the difference. The midi archive started just to put appropriate-themed music in one place so we could use them on websites much like the image gallery. Once we couldn't embed them I eventually stopped keeping up with the page because it just wasn't useful anymore. Luckily past me had a copy of the webpage in the midi folder itself so it was carried on along with the website in the background.

I might be misremembering but I believe either Spooky or Moody was actually made for me by the guy that did the music for my Zombie Petting Zoo videos, Twisted_Project/Zer0 Disciple. The one he made for certain was embedded into a flash file, which sadly just got murdered by Adobe so I can't compare to verify. I've got a ton of his music and a profanity filled authorization letter to do whatever I like with it so if that interests anyone...

Barring hard drive failures over the years and moments where I overwrote files accidentally, I've got backups of everything I've touched going back to the old Nightmare/Atmosfear Ring. Most of the real content is already up on the Well of Fears but I could probably spend a few afternoons comparing and uploading more. I've got ugly old test versions of the original ANSworld version of the layout, unfinished website updates, and those images I faked when we ran the April Fools "Atmosfear Chronicles" tease. (For a while I was really tempted to suggest renaming the wiki to that).

Just hit me with a stick if there's anything else you'd like to take a peak at and I'll go digging. I can't promise any of it is in a state that's going to be useful to anyone but I'd be happy to look if that's the case. If I don't answer here, marr0wproductions@gmail.com always works.

Great job with the soundtracks by the way. I'm kinda kicking myself for not doing something similar after how much time I spent pulling and correcting the audio from different Thrill Me versions.
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby BonsaiTreehouse » Sat Jan 16, 2021 6:55 pm

Thanks for the kind words, dude! Dreaming for someone to bless us with a full soundtrack remaster one day...

That Zer0 Disciple music library already fascinates me from how ancient it must be by now, even if most of the other MIDIs were just covers. I'm not too music literate, so I don't know if I'd be able to tell one original song from a cover of another al by myself.

Even so, it's very interesting to hear about the history of the site and everyone who contributed in their own ways! Speaking of which, I just took some time to go through the old site you just linked and throw it all into the Wayback Machine archive, should the pages ever go down again. That means your Atmosfear RPG word doc is safe and sound! ;P

(Also, why does the name "Zombie Petting Zoo" ring a bell to me despite never knowing about it until now?)
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby marr0w » Sat Jan 16, 2021 8:38 pm

Probably from me hiding stuff about it all over the place. There was even a time where I rebranded Marr0w_Productions as Chuck's Zombie Petting Zoo because when we where filming it I went full tilt with it. They're terrible but they where fun to make. I have them uploaded to the same YouTube account where the Well of Fears stuff is uploaded, so maybe they come up as recommended? https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 5DA82DA381 It was supposed to be horror shorts where I wanted to experiment with makeup and gore FX but we filmed them after I got off work pulling third shifts so most of them are just us swearing too much and making threats that never seem to go anywhere. People keep trying to get me to make more and to be fair I'd like to, but I'm just not that angry these days.

The Zer0_Disciple stuff can be found here: http://marrowproductions.com/zer0_disciple/ It's everything he made up until I had to split ties with him for various reasons. I'm not entirely sure if he's given up on music completely but it's been at least 13 years since he's released anything substantial. (I think I'm still listed as his manager on Last.fm) It's got a crunchy industrial vibe to all of it. Some of his moodier stuff is really good. He had no faith in himself and it shows in some of his earlier music. When he'd focus though he was amazing. Most of the Petting Zoo tracks would be perfect for an Atmosfear project with a little more ambience thrown in. Sadly if I do move forwards with Chuck's Zombie Petting Zoo I likely won't continue to use his music simply because I'd like to cut off ties with him completely. I'm 90% sure he's made all of it public domain however.

Getting back on topic, you can thank Darkwolff and Faust for most of the Nightmare/Atmosfear fan stuff. They reached out to me back in the day when the webring got started. I knew I couldn't really compete with al the stuff they'd put together so I just made it a point to focus on scanning what I could and making a library of all of it available. Darkwolff and I got into a friendly rivalry over our websites for a little while and that eventually led to us going in together to start the Well of Fears. Everyone's lives got crazy around then which is why I largely handled the website stuff leaving everyone else to focus on the forums and the community. I always kinda expected them to come in and take over the web stuff too, but no harm no foul. I've had a blast being part of this insanity, and at least no one's seen any UFOs in a few years. >_>;;
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby DarkWolff » Sun Jan 17, 2021 11:03 am

Sometimes it makes me sad that I didn't take on the webstuff because my knowledge of web dev is very fractured and out of date in some areas. I learned a lot during that rivarly and made a few web pages unconnected to this group that were pretty good. The last thing of note I did was about 8 yrs ago I mindlessly hacked my employer's website looking for missing data ...whoops! I reported myself and they fixed a rather glaring security hole so it worked out.
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby marr0w » Sun Jan 17, 2021 6:07 pm

"Mindlessly hacked an employer's website"? Whoops indeed. My kneejerk reaction is to question, "How the hell does one mindlessly hack a website?" But sadly with my experience with corporate websites some are so laughably under secure that it's downright insulting. Then again I feel bad enough for the failings of this website so I should probably not judge. I'm partly banking on the fact that we're a niche enough group that our worst problems are the automated spam-bots. Just do me a favor and no one start a rivalry with another gaming group please? The thought of having to rebuild everything in order to get it all up to date is enough to make me go cry in a corner.

As for fractured knowledge and such https://www.w3schools.com is a wonderful resource that I generally look to whenever I start having to do anything website-related just to refresh my memory and make sure what I do remember hasn't changed dramatically since the last time I had to do a task. Just look up a function that you want and it'll tell you everything about it including interactive examples. It often comes up in google searches too so if you don't like the website's search function you can bypass it easily.
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Re: What ever happened to the MIDI archive?

Postby BonsaiTreehouse » Sun Jan 17, 2021 7:08 pm

Been sifting through the midis and running as many of them as I could through stuff like Shazam and actually managed to recognise a few songs (GONNA BE CONTINUALLY UPDATING THIS POST A BIT AS NEW SOMG NAMES ARE FOUND):

1. "music9" The Call of Ktulu - Metallica (for 'Ride the Lightning')
2. "music6" Battle to the Death - Nobu Uematsu (for 'Final Fantasy VI')
3. "castlevania" Requiem for the Gods - Michiru Yamane (for 'Castlevania: Symphony of the Night')
4. "music5" Magus' Castle - Yasunori Mitsuda (for 'Chrono Trigger')
6. "music10/Hellraiser?" It Was Always You, Helen - Philip Glass (for Candyman)
7. "music11" Casper's Lullaby - James Horner (for 'Casper')
8. "music12" Bolero - The Fat Man and Team Fat (for '7/11')
9. "music13" One Man's Dream - Yanni (for 'In My Time')
14. "music18" Introduction - Danny Elfman (for 'Edward Scissorhands')
15. "music19" End Credits - Charles Bernstein (for 'The Entity')
16. "music20/TheExorcistTheme" Tubular Bells Part One - Mile Oldfield (for 'Tubular Bells')
18. "music22" Main Title - John Carpenter (for 'Halloween')
23. "music27" Opening Theme - John Van Tongeren (for 'The Outer Limits' Remake Series)
25. "music29" Main Title - Fred Myrow & Malcom Seagreave (for 'Phantasm')
27. "music31" Prelude - Bernard Herrmann (for 'Psycho')
28. "music32" Vampire Hunters - Wojciech Kilar (for 'Bram Stoker's Dracula')
33. "music37" Sh*tty Chicken Gang Bang (Original Version) - Marylin Manson (for 'Smells Like Children')
34. "music38" Theme Song - Bernard Herrmann (for 'The Twilight Zone')
39. "music8" Am I Evil - Diamond Head (for 'Lightning to the Nations')
44. "m1a1" M1A1 - Damon Albarn (for 'Gorillaz')
Hidden Bonus: Duvet - Boa (for ‘Twilight’)

Here are the ones that even Shazam couldn't help identify but which I left some impressions of to hopefully give you folks more of a clue than I have:

10. "music14" [sounds like something from a police detective show?]
12. "music16" [Feels like the opening music to a western...?]
13. "music17" [I want to say it's some really elaborate JRPG music...]
19. "music23" [I feel like I'm about to fight in a medieval fantasy war]
20. "music24" [Definitely not Candyman, though it sounds very close to Hellraiser, it's not quite]
22. "music26" [Feels like its from a John Carpenter action movie?]
26. "music30" [Too short and generic to tell if it's a cover of anything at all]
29. "music33" [nice ghostly voice effects, don't know about this one either]
30. "music34" [more medieval fantasy vibes, maybe a JRPG town or tavern?]
35. "music39" [Sounds like a kick-up-the-arse motivational moment in a movie before facing a big bad]
36. "music3" [Another short one, kinda JRPG sounding, feels like trudging through a swamp]
37. "Zombies" [Maybe the title means it's from Dawn Of The Dead?]
38. "Hell" [Distinctive, but still no idea why something so soothing is called "hell"]
40. "Moody" [either this or "spooky" was the completely original piece and I reckon it's this one imo]
42. "Labyrinth" [The melody sounds VERY close to the David Bowie Jim Henson movie theme, maybe it's a riff?]

43. "Roth(s)" The Haunting ('Realms of the Haunting') [Also found this on a 'Realms Of The Haunting' fan walkthrough site made with angelfire, but there's no official soundtrack reference to say for definite that this is from the classic "R.O.T.H." horror adventure game]

Here's some tracks I found on OTHER midi-hosting sites with the same name or even alternate names and no sources or any form of proper accreditation:

5. "spooky" [sounds like something from a Resident Evil game?]
11/41. "music15/Devil/shadowlord/Doom?" [Feels like one, but it doesn't look like it's from a Doom game]
17. "graveyard" [This could be anything for all I know]
21. "music25" Here Comes Death/Lurkers [Another track that feels like Resident Evil]
24. "music28" Spooky7 [Feeling very fantasy-like again]
31. "music35" SpookyBells [this gentle music box song could be almost anything]
32. "music36" Spooky2 [this one feels like the opening to Killer Klowns even though it isn't]

And here's the outliers that weren't available on the site itself, but which were on adjacent Atmosfear fan sites which I felt warranted having them be listed here anyway:

"Heretic" The Docks/E1M1 - Kevin Schilder (for 'Heretic')
"Tales": Title - Danny Elfman (for ‘Tales from the Crypt‘)
Last edited by BonsaiTreehouse on Mon Jan 18, 2021 1:10 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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