The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Well, here I am listening to my collection of downloaded Star Control II mods and mp3s in Winamp, when I notice that some of the songs playing actually have titles.  Songs I familiarily knew as the "Arilou Theme" read "Going back a bit" when I played them in a Winamp playlist.  Following this trend was also the original Quasi-Space theme, titled "Mystic Shadows".  Is there a meaning to these names?  Are they maybe just a mix-up of titles by the person who named the mods?  Were these the names given to the songs before they were composed or chosen for the game?  I'm sorry if this has been a topic previously discussed, but it's something that's been eating at my mind...  ... and my sanity.   ;D

I've never heard much of the particulars of how exactly it was done, but Once Upon a Time(tm),  Toys For Bob held an "open audition" for music to be included in the game.  They supposedly announced it on Usenet, and people from all over the world submitted songs to them for use in the game.  Some people just submitted songs they had already written for other purposes that were so good they made it into the game, e.g., the Supox theme, titled "Fuschia Fantasy" and whose credits talk about some demo party in 1992, and others appear to have been written with particular aliens in mind, sometimes wrongfully (which is why the Kohr-Ah theme is titled "Slylandro Theme")

According to the memberlist for this board, Riku Nuottajarvi (the creator of some of the best tunes in the game) is a member here, perhaps he can be cajoled into spilling the minute details of the process?

Cool, I've always loved the music in Star Control II and was even more surprised to learn (almost a month ago) that alot of the songs were simply sent into a contest... I would've surely thought that all the 'composers' (hehe, perhaps that's not the best word to use... ... uhm, music guys!  That's better...) were musical geniuses who had been employed at Accolade and paid for what they did.  And hey, here they were... normal guys with a great talent in making mods and the like.

Here, maybe I'll make a list of all the songs that seem to have alternate, or "pre-Star Control II" titles given to them... at least, these are the ones which have alternate titles when played in my winamp playlist:

SC2 Name:           Mod Name:
- Arilou Theme - "Going back a bit"
- Chmmr Theme - "Working Song" (?)
- Vux Theme - "Alien Doom"
- Supox Theme - "Fuchia Fantasy" (Apparently this song was meant to be a hyperspace type of space exploration theme, but was not orignally meant for SC2... or at least, that's what I heard when The Finn's song was picked in the contest thingy.)
- QuasiSpace Theme - "Mystic Shadows"
- Melnorme Theme - "Potato Juice" (Hehe...)
- Starbase Menu Theme - "Alien Trance"

Some mods I've downloaded seem to have been meant for other races or places in the game as well...  I wonder whether they were planned to be used for the latter titled parts of the game in quotations, or whether this is a name mix-up or something... anywho, here they are:

SC2 Name:           Mod Name:
- Ilwrath Theme - "Ur-Quan Kzer-Za"
- Kohr-Ah Theme - "Slylandro Theme"
- Outfit Starship - "Theme Music?"
- Shipyard - "Druuge Music"
- TrueSpace Theme - "Configuring Ship"

Where are these mp3's? I have the ogg files, but my efforts to play them raw have so far been fruitless.

Ogg players (I have a little experience with the subject (http://webplay.sf.net/)):

All platforms:

• ogg123 - in the vorbis-tools distribution from xiph.org.  A command-line tool, and about as basic as they come.

win32:

• Winamp - from http://www.winamp.com In Winamp 3.x Ogg Vorbis support is broken (and may be fixed by now), but Winamp 2.x definitely works fine.
  
• Zinf - from http://www.zinf.org  Pretty much the same as Winamp functionally, but with a few different decisions made wrt layout that may or may not be preferable to people.

MacOS:

• Audion - from http://www.panic.com  This is hands-down the best audio player for MacOS, it shows up iTunes for the buggy piece of crap that it is.  Newer versions can even drive an iPod, leaving you with basically no reason to use iTunes, unless you like bloat and rebuilding your MP3 songlist every few weeks.  Unlike all other offerings I've posted, this one costs money, but they have a fully-functional demo (that does not expire), and you might be convinced to send them some cash after using it for a while anyways.

X11:

• xmms - from http://www.xmms.org  A near-perfect clone of Winamp for X11.  Even uses Winamp skins.

you can d/l the mp3s from DJ Spathi at http://www.star-cnotrol.com, teh Pages of Now and Forever.

Ah, you haven't downloaded potatojuice.mp3 from here (http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/68/robots_are_supreme.html), have you? It's... strange, though mostly unintelligible. This was posted in the PNF a while (a year or so?) ago, if I recall correctly.

I say we come up with our own names for all these songs, like how RPG series always name their songs.  But we should make light of that.  Here's some suggestions:

Hyperspace: "Adventure, Ho!"
Quasispace: "It's Green, Jim"
Battle: "We're All SCREWED"
Umgah theme: "Bloated Fish Sacs"
Druuge theme: "Where Do You Want To Go Today?"
Arilou theme: "Gimme some *NNNGN*, baby!"

Actually, I'd better stop now before this hole I just dug gets any deeper.

Huh - I haven't had any trouble with iTunes aside from some silly assumptions it makes, but those are easily gotten around. Certainly nothing on the order of having to rebuild a playlist.

Thanks for the heads up!

btw: where in the content is the music? I can get the speech, but the music is eluding me.