What Are The Top Questions You Have About Music & Audio in Video Games or Music / Audio Production?

Top 5 Community Questions:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

------------- Questions Will Appear As They Are Submitted By The Community -------------

Hey guys, 

I am currently writing a few audio guides for game developers and music producers but I am having trouble coming up with good topics to address, so what better way then to ask you guys yourselves!

Please tell me, if there was only one thing you could learn about the usage of music, sound effects or general audio in video games or music production in general, what would it be?

And if there are a few more questions you have, please list them as well! I want to see which questions routinely pop up in the community over and over so I can address the top 5-10 questions everyone has and write a guide on it!

Thanks for contributing your questions!

How about, do you know anything about not necessarily putting songs into games, but instruments, and the game will play the instruments to create songs while you're playing the game to make the filesize of the audio as small as possible

Sebastien Do you know Magix Music Maker? It sounds that could hit your requirement.

Little example what is possible:

youtube.com/watch

How about, do you know anything about not necessarily putting songs into games, but instruments, and the game will play the instruments to create songs while you're playing the game to make the filesize of the audio as small as possible

In the early days of video games, most consoles or computers would have a dedicated sound card to control the different noises it could make. Different sound cards would have different numbers of "voices"—essentially different channels—and different menu of waves those channels could issue simultaneously. These limitations ultimately defined the iconic sounds of the gadgets they were inside. (Source: popularmechanics.com/technology/audio/a17684/8-bit-guy-vintage-sound/)

MIDI evolved out of this to create a more uniform approach to digital music creation. MIDI is an arrangement of musical notes and codes representing what instruments they should be played on, and there is a library of instruments which correspond with modern MIDI that can be used to play music in your game.

However this limits you to the predefined instruments in the General MIDI Library and they definitely do not have a modern sound to them haha.

A better approach is to compose music and use an audio container such as .ogg vorbis to compress the music to a small file size. Even modern music can be made into incredibly small files if you're willing to sacrifice quality.

Most game making engines support .ogg as well, so that is what I'd recommend. A tool such as Audacity or izotope RX Audio can be used to compress audio in .ogg format.

So, and if it is possible, what friendly softwares could you advise us for this type of workflow (always on PC/Windows)? Thank you again for your attention and your professional lighting.

The more control you have over the music, the more complex everything becomes. Many aspiring music producers become lost or give up due to the complexity of volume and location/spacialization of instruments otherwise known simply as "Mixing."

If you're really looking for something to keep it simple you want to minimize how much mixing you will have to do, and for that I would suggest a program like Fruity Loops Studio which unlike the name suggests, isn't just loops but professional and full production software, especially for beginners.

Fruity loops contains many visual feedback plugins which help to SEE the changes you are making to each instrument rather than just looking at a bunch of knobs and sliders.

Fruity Loops also contains many demo files and tutorial projects you can open up and examine to learn how everything works.

Another reason I recommend it is because the workflow is based on creating repeating loops and mixing them together rather than having to put everything manually onto a linear time frame. This makes the music a bit more intuitive and fun to make.

I grew up on Fruity Loops and although it does not give me control over my mixing as much as I would like, I still recommend it today.

Personally I use Ableton, but ableton is not as beginner friendly and frankly it's starting instrument library is pathetic.

Fruity Loops is better for an out of the box experience because it includes many powerful and unique synthesizers to get you started whereas Ableton and many other professional DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) pretty much expect you to install your own synthesizers otherwise known as VSTi's.

VSTi instruments are compatable with most DAWs so if you download some and use them in Fruity Loops then eventually switch to another DAW, you can carry over your synths and still use them so it won't be a completely foreign experience.

My general advice to all new music producers would be to keep the volume down and turn your speakers up until you get a lot of practice. Then and only then would I recommend experimenting with raising the volume or using tools on your instruments to make them louder in the software itself.

Thank you very much Jordan for all this valuable information, advices and very complete feedback.

I think I've already tested Fruity Loops, but it was a lot of time ago and the software didn't look like what it looks today.

Indeed, creativity seems to be highly valued for intuitive, simple and modern handling, while offering more advanced options for the most experienced users.

However, the solution and the different options seem to require a certain budget, but I will, when time may allows me more, already start by downloading the trial version.

Thank you also Asmodean, Magix Music Maker looks so interesting too!

Good luck, continuation and inspiration to all! :-)