Exult Digital Music (OGG) pack for Ultima7 Black Gate and Serpent Isle.
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Music Pack version 1.0

IMPORTANT!! These files are only supported AFTER v1.0 of Exult. 

Here are the Digital Music tracks (encoded using OGG) for Exult. This music was recorded directly from the Roland MT-32 synthesizer. The complete tracks are present for Black Gate and Serpent Isle, these tracks being shared between the two games.

With this pack you can enjoy the original Ultima7 music as it would have sounded on the Roland MT-32 and as the composers originally intended. This is my tribute to the composers of this music which I think was some of the best music composed for any computer game.


INSTALLATION
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Create a music directory in exult/data (i.e. exult/data/music/) and extract the two ZIP files U7MusicOGG_1of2.zip and U7MusicOGG_2of2.zip into this directory. 
Start the game and select "DigitalMusic" from the "SETUP/Midi Convert" option and restart the game.


Enjoy
Simon Quinn



TECHNICAL DETAILS
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OGG is similar to MP3, but was chosen due it being a totally open and free implementation and having better support in SDL_mixer. The music was recorded in OGG using 22KHz and the lowest possible bit rate but are of high quality and in most cases you won't be able to tell the difference in sound quality compared to listening directly with the original MT-32. The 22Khz sampling rate limit doesn't really matter as the MT-32 voices rarely go above 11Khz.

The recording was completed using MIDI tracks extracted from the two games' FLX files. The SYSEX information was extracted from the MT-32 after running from the original Ultima7 - which programmed the synth. Then a laborious process of loading the SYSEX file, playing the relevant tunes and recording the music produced each of the music tracks. No processing or volume dynamics compression was used, i.e. the loudest volume for the whole music reaches a peak of around 0db so although many of the tracks appear quiet this is what the original composers intended and matches how the game would have sounded with the original Ultima7.

Once recording was finished the tracks were sorted into the correct order and mappings created for Serpent Isle so that it could share the same tracks as used in Black Gate - track numbers are different between the two and SI has a number of additional tracks.

There are a number of SFX only "music" tracks (numbers 4 to 8 and 52) that you will not have heard before in Exult because the sounds could not be mapped to General MIDI voices. These have background SFX such as wind,  birds chirping, frogs and various SFX inside dungeons. Subtle sounds, but they add to the realism of the Ultima7 world.