So, when I'm actually playing through a hold myself I usually use the game's default music. It might also be the case that I don't have the patience to stare at a single room for 40 minutes so I don't run into the same problem there, but I usually feel like the music fits the gameplay well, especially with more "
intense"
tracks for higher numbers of enemies and more "
relaxed"
tracks for almost no enemies.
The problem I find in architecture is that while building the "
relaxed"
track for the relevant style plays on loop, forever, and I spend a lot of time building puzzles. So I usually turn off music in the settings when I'm editing a level and, indeed, listen to other music instead (but still leave the DROD sound effects on).
I have windows media player loaded with a gigantic list of all the music I both have and like called "
Full Mix"
, and usually shuffle that list to make a hundred-plus-hour playlist of songs that I listen to for basically everything that doesn't have its own soundtrack or whose soundtrack I find inadequate--DROD architecture, writing, trying to do math. I used to do the same for editing portal 2 levels, for instance.
What's in the list? I have lots of stuff from
ocremix.org, which deals in "
ReMiXes"
(more like rearrangements) of video game music. There's such a massive plethora of options to pick from there, and it's especially nice to find a good remix of a track you already like. I'm disappointed that they don't have remixes of anything from (DROD, the 7th dragon series, the Atelier series, etc.) but what they
do have is still quite a lot, and quite good. I can particularly recommend
so many things from there; a small sampling would be the
Candy Corn albums by Yoshiblade, nearly everything from the three
boss battle remix albums and a lot of their
undertale remixes and so on. Beyond just albums/groupings there are probably 200+ individual songs I've downloaded from there; my recommendation to someone going there for the first time is just to look up a game you love or whose music you think is good and poke about the mixes there, identify artists you like and see what else they've done, and go on from there.
Speaking of rearrangements of video game songs, I've also recently gotten into
GaMetal aka Jonny Atma, who's been doing metal covers of game songs for 4+ years and
all of it is free to download. If you're uncertain he has a youtube channel you can hear those songs from. Pretty great.
There's also various bits of slightly better-known artists on the list, like most of Weird Al's discography, some The Bravery and Franz Ferdinand, Celldweller, "
Under Pressure"
by David Bowie and Queen. Maybe that tells you something about my tastes in general, I dunno?
But speaking of comedy music, I can highly recommend the entire "
Mouth"
series of mashup/remix albums by one Neil Cicierega. I suggest starting from
Silence then going to
Sounds and finally the later-released
Moods album. Neil has a unique style of trolling and telling jokes through music, and the sheer musicality of what he made out of mostly various pop garbage from the last few decades is absolutely astounding. Just be prepared for a
lot of Smash Mouth. The songs are good on their own, too, but I strongly recommend experiencing the entire albums your first time through; some of the best jokes shine through that way.
The final gigantic chunk of my music library comes from
Lapfox aka Vulpvibe (in the past) aka Halley labs (in the present). To be clear, this is a wide collection of music by
one person going under a large number of different aliases, with each alias having its own specific genre and style of its own. Honestly I like Renard's older stuff a lot better than most of the newer stuff, but the fact that the newer stuff has come into existence has pushed a lot of the older work that used to cost money into "
this is old so you can download it for free"
territory, which I couldn't be happier about. (Maybe it's obvious by now but I'm kind of cheapskate in general, so anything I can get for free and enjoy is great for me). The wide variety of music, most of it amazing, all coming from one person, is staggering, and although I appreciate it's possible for all of it to be outside of someone else's tastes it certainly does the job for me.
____________________________
109th Skywatcher
Here are some links to Things!
Click here to view the secret text
[Last edited by Xindaris at 04-04-2019 07:34 PM]
