The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Okay, so I wanted to hear some of the original .mod music from SC2, outside the game. So I downloaded a few of them from the Precursors site and played them in Modplug Player. The thing is, they sound NOTHING like the music in-game. (i checked)

Does this have something to do with the player I'm using? Or something else?

MODs on Precursors site sound OK to me in Modplug-XMMS 2.05 on Linux. Which version of the game are you comparing them to? Are you saying SC2 has completely different tunes to the ones on the Precursors site, or do they just sound different?

Have you tried using the MOD files included in UQM instead of the ones on the Precursors site? They should be the same, though.

Sorry, I was kinda vauge. What I mean is, the .mods from the Precursors site sound different then the music in UQM. Like, much lower quality samples.

And I can't seem to find the .mod files in the UQM directory on my computer anywhere....am I looking in the wrong place?

try... WINAMP, they will sound the same.

Ur-Quan music will be in:
game directory/content/packages/uqm-0.6.0-content.uqm/comm/urquan
Utwig music in:
game directory/content/packages/uqm-0.6.0-content.uqm/comm/utwig
etc.

hyperspace, meele, and shipyard tune should be in:
game directory/content/packages/uqm-0.6.0-content.uqm/Lbm
while intro and victory music in:
game directory/content/packages/uqm-0.6.0-content.uqm/slides

I suggest you check the quality settings in ModPlug Player. Although MOD files contain their own (by modern standards quite low quality) instrument samples, the sampling frequency at which they are mixed together and the method (interpolation) used to resample them to the mixing frequency strongly affect the resulting quality.

Basically, unless you are really short on CPU time, a good setup for MOD files is 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo (CD quality) with the most advanced interpolation method available ("high quality", apparently, whatever that means). That corresponds roughly to UQM's "high quality" setting.

ModPlug also has a bunch of additional effects like EQ, reverb and surround that UQM doesn't use.

The .uqm files in content/packages (in the UQM directory) are actually ZIP files containing all of the game data in easy-to-read form. See content management section of UQM wiki (http://uqm.stack.nl/wiki/Content_Management) for details. The PC music is stored as MOD files, the text as UTF-8 text, the graphics as PNG and so on, making it almost trivial to extract and modify content.

Hm. Okay, I didn't know about opening the .uqm files. I'll try that... EDIT: and how exactly do you open them? MPtracker doesn't work.

EDIT EDIT: That IS the the quality setting I had it on, btw. I think the 3do music might be different from the PC version...

The .uqm files are .zip files, but renamed so people won't try to unzip them when installing the game (UQM uses them zipped).

Rename .uqm file to .zip and use your favourite ZIP unpacker (recent versions of Windows have one built in). Rename it back to play UQM.

Good.

The alien races have the same music, but the 3DO version replaces some tunes like HyperSpace, Shipyard and Starbase with remixes and has some completely new music (QuasiSpace, intro/ending, IIRC). The dialogue background music should be identical (the same MOD files).

That's it, you just have to rename them? Kay, thanks! YET ANOTHER EDIT: Simply renaming them with .zip doesn't seem to work, at least in XP...