An Ambitious Endeavor - UMX Remastering Project

[Amaroq Clearwater]

I am typing this on my phone, but I would like to announce that I am taking some Unreal and Unreal Tournament and fixing some issues regarding loops and samples, among a few other things.

The quality of these remasters is not going to be consistent, as I worked on these over the months (Course2.it was made today, and what I believe to be my best one.)
Generation-One Remasters

Enjoy these, and feel free to request a song.

EDIT: These were my first attempt, so they are very inconsistent and have a lower average quality compared to all of the ones you will see below.

[iLikeTheUDK]

It'll be awesome if you remaster some music from the Unreal 1 betas and alphas. Some favourites of mine are Solitary Silhouette, Overture, Deep Chill, Starship One, Magnus, Unreal 12, UNREAL.umx/Underworld (probably including the new parts in Underworld.umx), Unreal Suspense, Soledad, Opal and Vantage Point.
From tracks from released Unreal, I'd choose a few out of Flightcastle, Dig, Chizra, SETI, Hub2, Nightvision with some of the melodies and sections from the beta version (like the original from 1996) added back in it (even with some different sounds if the original doesn't work that well with Terraniux), Crypt, Alien-esque (Hub5), some version of NewMCA9, Sunspire, All Hallows Sunset, the full version of Isotoxin (from 1995, as appeared in "In Pursuit of Greed"), War Gate, Hub7, ExtremeEnd, the action section of Queen of Death, and the main theme.
Out of RTNP, I'd choose Red Blossom (Neve's Crossing) and The Walking (Gala's Peak).

BTW, I hardly saw any examples of VST effects in the current remastered ITs, despite your promise. No echo, no reverb, no chorus, no flanger, no distortion, nothing.

[Amaroq Clearwater]

Sorry for the late reply, I was mainly toying with reverb and flanger, plus things like Volume/Pitch/Panning envelopes and "New Note" settings and random panning variation and stuff like that. I apologize for not holding up to my promise.

However, I have gotten a lot better with OpenMPT since then. You should not be too displeased with my Surface.UMX remaster.



I will also attach MP3s later so that you can easily compare the remaster with the original. And yes, the Surface remaster DOES have Reverb and Flanger, mainly applied to the percussion. I gave up on the envelopes and on random variation things a long time ago, so you won't see any of that.

And I am sorry that my Course remaster didn't live up to expectations either. I was also working on Shared Dig some time in the past, but I ended up ruining it along with Nightvision (fortunately, I had backups of the originals, but I won't be doing my two favorites any time soon).

- - - -

In unrelated news, a more recent update of ModPlug tracker messed S3M playback (so Nightvision now sounded exactly like it did in pre-227 Unreal), so I went to MogPlug Central to request an option to enable/disable S3M compatibility mode. While I was there, I also saw somebody sharing really old modules, and I found a really neat one called "Into the Shadow." It was the first module I remastered in forever (I did it just before Surface), so I will share that (along with the original) as well.

Into the Shadow - Remaster
Into the Shadow - Original

TL-DR: I also did a remaster of a song that wasn't from Unreal, because why not.

[Amaroq Clearwater]

Okay, here is another Unreal remaster, I think I am getting back into the swing of things.

Hope you enjoy this version of Interlude II!


If you start the song from Position 01, you get to hear Prisoner 849's first log recording as well. Just an added bonus for any RTNP fans.

- - - -



Decided to share a remastered Found99.it as well.

[Amaroq Clearwater]

Okay, I am posting a lot, but here is another one for you to all enjoy, Nether Animal. I actually found this one on accident (I have all of the Unreal Gold music in my UT99 directory and vice versa) when I was trying to find Neve's Crossing (which is coming soon, by the way).

-- Nether Animal | Remastered --

[Amaroq Clearwater]

Okay, here is a WHOLE bunch of modules this time. Enjoy them, I think I did a really good job on these.

Journey.it (Nagomi Passage - Day)


Sacred.it (Nagomi Passage - Night)


Moroset.it (Morose)


Mountain.it (Mountain Fortress)


SkyTwn.it (All Hallows Sunset)


Seti.it (SETI)


Soledad1.it (Soledad)

[MusicallyInspired]

What is it actually that you're doing? Taking the original MODs and adding higher quality samples with cleaner loop points and such? Or...? They sound good!

[Amaroq Clearwater]

Mainly just converting S3Ms to ITs and then adding a bunch of VST effects. I did modify a few samples though for cleaner looping. And for some songs, I rearranged some of the patterns to make it more cohesive (there are a lot of songs where the main section abruptly switches to the action section, one of the things that I fixed). Also, Found99 had a few unused patterns, and for one of the songs I added a bassline to the opening of each section.

So what did you think of my Interlude II rendition?

- - - -
Edit: I have now uploaded a remaster of Walking and a remaster of Run.

Walking.it


Run.it


I think you should give a shot at the whole remastering thing, too. I want to see what you can come up with using all of the features OpenMPT provides.

[スマイル・ドラゴン]

While OpenMPT is nice, I'd be more interested in seeing remixes using better samples and possibly also resonance filtering. A majority of samples used in tracker music from the Amiga all the way to the DOS days are sampled from high dollar synths at the time, I'm pretty sure these synths have been turned into VSTi's by now.

Do you have any experience at all with using the original ImpulseTracker for MS-DOS? I use that for all my music making needs.

[Amaroq Clearwater]

No, I do not. But the thing is, ModPlug Tracker can do a lot of things that older trackers for MS-DOS couldn't do, and I am making these remasters to be compatible with pre-227 Unreal.

Also, the emphasis here is that these are not remixes.

[iLikeTheUDK]

Unreal never supported tracker effects as far as I'm aware.

[スマイル・ドラゴン]

If by making them "compatible with pre-227" you mean Galaxy then you're in for one hell of a problem.

Galaxy has the worst IT replayer code I've ever seen. I've had to do alot of stupid hacks even in IT.EXE to get my music to sound right in Unreal, everything from using only S3M compatible effects to not using Instrument mode. Retrigger notes are the most problematic of them all. Combination effects are also a nightmare. (see: Extreme End)

A good example of these hoops you have to jump over would be Deus Ex's music. ImpulseTracker was used for the entirety of that games music and all the songs use Sample based control and rarely touch IT specific effects, focusing on S3M instead despite using the .IT module format.

Also are you sure you are using VST effects or are you confusing it with DMO (Direct Music Object)? ModPlug Tracker originally introduced DMO support for things like reverb and chorus effects. I never tried the VST client but I'm pretty sure when you make use of VST, everybody has to have the same thing installed as you to hear the effects at all. I'm pretty sure by analogy OpenMPT can use DMO or VST.

"Effect plugins" don't function with libopenmpt, from what I can tell. I don't run OpenMPT under wine for various reasons.

[Amaroq Clearwater]

Oh, I must have been mistaken then. Well, I am not talented enough to make actual remixes or original compositions (or at least nothing good, just look at my attempt with Beaterator up on my SoundCloud), plus I want these to be actual tracker modules, files that you can just plug-and-play. (I misworded when I said "pre-227", because I don't want to just make non-loopable, single-song Ogg files).

And yeah, I am using DMO. My version of OpenMPT just calls them VSTs though... Same thing with instrument envelopes.

But yeah, I guess these will require 227 afterall.

[スマイル・ドラゴン]

They don't just require 227 they will require a large portion of OpenMPT's code if you're making use of the "Effects" part of the tracker.

libopenmpt doesn't implement the DMO\VST effects because that's heavily windows proprietary oriented code. (VST especially since it's Steinberg's IP) plus it's not a standard tracker feature, nor are the formats properly capable of conveying that info. (apart from OpenMPT's hackjob IT file)

Not to discourage you from making your remasters, just that if anyone wants to hear these right they need to use the same version of OpenMPT as you are, and it must be run under Windows. (Assuming you're using the latest version of the tracker)

[Amaroq Clearwater]

Damn... (I hate Microsoft even more now)

Well, what about EFX plugins?

- - - -

In unrelated news, ImpulseTracker is going Open Source. Maybe that could be used to build a new sound engine for Unreal. Probably won't help much for my remasters, but whatever. At least ITs would sound better.

[スマイル・ドラゴン]

If Jeffery Lim is actually going to cough up the ASM source code to his resonance filter code it will mean alot to bit-wise playback of .IT, apart from that there's no real need to make something out of the released source in my opinion.

EFX, if you're referring to OpenAL it's doable but EFX is pretty constrained from my experience in using it... Plus the implementation of it will differ between different OpenAL providers. Also I'm pretty sure Creative maintains a stupid patent over that crap.

I can imagine once the licensing crap with IT's source code (if that has not yet been resolved) is overwith and it is a GPL compatible license, the IT source code will vastly improve OpenMPT and schism's .IT replayer. Which in turn can be used to make Unreal's music suck less in 227.

Now if only we had FT2 and ST3 source...

By the way if you ever feel like discussing tracker music with me directly, you can contact me through Steam. I've yet to install Skype on Linux and for the most part I'm a bit skeptical even attempting to do so. I wish Microsoft didn't hose .NET Messenger Service, I used to be in contact with alot of Unreal players through that.

[Amaroq Clearwater]

You're confusing EFX with EAX.

EAX is what Creative uses. EFX on the otherhand is Open Source IIRC. (Speaking of EAX, I was never able to install those Creative Labs test maps for Unreal because I have a Steam copy of Unreal Gold.)

Anyways, are there any substitutes for DMO that don't require Windows or ModPlug Tracker to work correctly?

[Amaroq Clearwater]

[ch12473][ch12510][ch12452][ch12523][ch12539][ch12489][ch12521][ch12468][ch12531], I do not know your Steam ID.

Anyways, here is my latest remaster, Spire.
Playing the song from position 0 is probably supposed to sound menacing, but it just makes me feel sad/angry when I listen to it. Like as if I were standing in a destroyed city.

[スマイル・ドラゴン]

My steam is located in my WWW link: [url]http://steamcommunity.com/id/SinikhalDe/[/url]

Unless they removed this you can also manually invite me by attempting to add the account "gyiygcosmicdestroyer996" as a friend. The add friends list seems to only try to search for username though, in any case it's: [ch954][ch965][ch957][ch953][ch954][ch972][ch962] [ch916][ch961][ch940][ch954][ch969][ch957]

You know, I noticed in your remasters you actually fix the pops and clicks from some of the samples due to their loop points being lazily made. Glad to know I'm not the only individual to have gone through fixing that crap.

[Amaroq Clearwater]

Interesting, and I am glad to hear that somebody else knows my pain.

Question to all of you:
Out of all of my remasters, which of them to you feel is the most well-done? How would you do it, if you think you can do better?