Second Edition Of Orchestral Wing Commander Recordings In The Works! (April 2, 2016)

ChrisReid

ChrisReid

Super Soaker Collector / Administrator



It's the beginning of April, but this is no joke! Former Origin composer George Oldziey recently tweeted this tantalizing message to Wing Commander fans:

I just entered the FIRST note of the first orchestration for volume 2 of the Wing Commander project! WC3 winning endgame! Stay tuned!
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If you missed out on the first campaign to create a live recording of Wing Commander music, there are still copies available here. Continued support of the original album has helped to offset some higher than anticipated international shipping costs. It's also now helping set the stage for a second album! No further details are available yet, but George also shared this kind message from the conductor, Allan Wilson, that directed the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra in their amazing Wing Commander tribute back in the fall of 2014:

Many thanks for the CD you sent recently and what a wonderful CD it is too! Absolutely superb. Although it popped through my letterbox a week or so ago, the first chance I had to listen to it was in my car yesterday as I drove out into the British countryside, south of London, on a beautiful sunny (but cold) day on some nice quiet county roads. I recently bought a 5 series BMW with a really good sound system; so your music accompanied my journey magnificently. Ia??m sure the car was going faster than usual too!

I thought the CD was very well presented, great graphics and brilliant photos. This is really quite an achievement George and something you must, and rightly so, feel very proud of indeed.

I am looking forward to having the house to myself for a couple of hours so I can play it on my lounge sound system at warp 9.2 to get the full impact. Cana??t wait.

Well my friend, it brought back so many wonderful memories of our time together in Bratislava, both in the studio and in the bar! I sincerely hope we can do it again in the not-too-distant future.
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So do we!

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Original update published on April 2, 2016
 
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I'm on board for this! Just a question of when the new Kickstarter(?) will start...
 
Vidmaster said:
Can we get these into the games somehow? At least into the newer ones?
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Yes... and no.

From a technical point of view, I don't think there would be any major obstacles. Certainly nobody has previously tried to put music into WC3/4, but it almost certainly would not be a problem. WCP is already done, of course. So, in terms of technology - yes.

In other aspects, however, it's a resounding no, because there's no way to release a patch of this kind and ensure that the only people who could use it would be those who already have the CD - and clearly it would not be appropriate to release even parts of this CD separately. At least, not without permission.
 
Quarto said:
In other aspects, however, it's a resounding no, because there's no way to release a patch of this kind and ensure that the only people who could use it would be those who already have the CD - and clearly it would not be appropriate to release even parts of this CD separately. At least, not without permission.
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Surely it's not an insurmountable task to extract and convert the data from the source download files/ CD?
 
Exactly my thoughts, a patch that basically replaces the Prophecy Tracks with the new ones IF AND ONLY IF you can provide the original physical or digital tracks...
 
Vidmaster said:
Exactly my thoughts, a patch that basically replaces the Prophecy Tracks with the new ones IF AND ONLY IF you can provide the original physical or digital tracks...
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Good luck with that.
 
The way to do it is to release a tool that will rip the right parts of the CD and then patch the game. So you run the program and insert your CD (or point it to the digital download) and the tool patches the files. You don't distribute the patched file, you distribute the tool itself.
 
Worf said:
The way to do it is to release a tool that will rip the right parts of the CD and then patch the game. So you run the program and insert your CD (or point it to the digital download) and the tool patches the files. You don't distribute the patched file, you distribute the tool itself.
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exactly
 
One thing to keep in mind is that you're not just doing 1-for-1 replacement of music files. These tracks can be in-flight, aboard the ship and during cutscenes. For the first two types, you're doing two different types of patching and then the tracks that George has re-recorded don't necessarily loop as they would in the game, so you'd either have to edit them or get used to new track breaks. And obviously the cutscene music syncing would need to revise the encoded video per cutscene at exactly the right moment, which is no small task (and would be different for both the xanmovie codec for the CD and rewriting the vob files for DVD editions of WC4 and Prophecy - you would probably want to distribute the actual edited video files).

All of the above is certainly technically possible, but it's a good chunk of work, and then in the end, there's only a handful of rerecorded tracks per game currently after you spread the album across WC3, WC4 and Prophecy, so you could play for hours and not encounter the new live music.

There's about a dozen of you out there reading this who could do it - you know who you are :) - would any of you consider taking this on over all the other WC projects you're already involved in?
 
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Are the existing videos done in such a way that the music can be stripped out and replaced? I suspect that with the possible exception of the DVDs that the sound is baked into them.
 
Even with the DVDs, the music isn't likely to be a separate track from the dialogue. There are some tricks you can do to try to isolate the music, but it's a difficult process and doesn't usually produce very good results. I'm not entirely sure what George did to edit together the WC4 intro, but there are places where the voices are missing; that's the sort of thing you'd have to deal with for the cut scenes. I'd say cut scenes are a no-go, even technically, without access to the original source tracks (which likely don't even exist anymore).

In-flight music is a different story; that could be done, but like Chris says, it's a ton of work, with a very small (legitimate) audience, and the benefit isn't high enough to justify it.
 
I think replacing the audio for the videos is a lost cause, but the music in-game seems achievable.
 
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