Snestopia

5-track album released on May 11,2020.

Click the album art below to go to its Bandcamp page:

The images above are from four of the various Super Mario World hacks I used to play back in 2014. At the time, I was playing these hacks and I felt like I wanted to make some SNES music. This was before I discovered Auxy Classic in November of that year. I looked around in SMWCentral, and found AddMusicK. I decided to try it since I heard some amazing stuff made with it (whether they used the samples that were already in SMW or custom samples). Though I read through the manual, I was still confused, and this is pretty much a program where you don't know how your song will sound until you've compiled it to an SPC. I did try other things to help me out, including other MML-based programs. I even tried to change the samples that were in one of the songs in SMW because I wanted to hear my custom samples in the game, but to no avail. So, I decided to leave it off to the side.

Going foward to mid 2016, I found SNESGSS (the last three letters stand for Game Sound System). I had already downloaded FamiTracker at this point and made some covers with it. I was excited that I found a tracker that can make SNES music. The first thing I didn't like about it upon first glance was that it used a continuous pattern rather than frames that contained individual patterns. You can split it into sections, but I didn't bother reading the included readme.txt at the time (I know, I should've read it), so I just left it aside. Two years later, in 2018, I decided to give SNESGSS another try. I was surprised that it did support MIDI in (since I had gotten a MIDI keyboard at the time), so using it, I was able to create my very first SNES song outside of MIDIs mimicking the SNES back in 2016 and OpenMPT using samples from various SNES games throughout 2017:

I do want to briefly mention that I also knew about SNESMod at this time, and I wasn't getting any good results with it when I tried it back in 2016, but I am getting great results this year, which I will get into a little bit. Going back to SNESGSS, I was satisfied that I was making SNES music, but I noticed how a little time-consuming it was to make a song with SNESGSS since, as I mentioned before, it uses a continuous pattern. In fact, the bar doesn't even follow the song, so you won't have any idea which part of your song you are in when it's playing. So, later in 2018, I decided to give up using SNESGSS and try out SNESMod again.

SNESMod is a command line program, but I find that using Windows PowerShell in Windows 10 works just as fine. It's basically an IT to SPC converter. The original version was made by Mukunda, but these days, I use a version that was modified by Augustus Blackheart and KungFuFurby, including some improvements and additional drivers (the ones I use the most are Super No FX and Celes drivers). So, after I stopped using SNESGSS, I decided to try something that I haven't done before when I used SNESMod in the past. That is, to actually prepare the samples before converting the song from IT to SPC. One thing I do is to shorten the length of the samples and then downsample them. I have learned from BinaryCounter that the percussion samples have to be crisp, and I remember kulor saying that downsampling removes high frequency content. It really makes sense for the percussion samples since downsampling them too much will make them muffled, which will also make the whole song sound muffled no matter what. In that case, they can be downsampled to 32kHz (which is the maximum rate the SNES's soundchip supports), and anything other than percussion can be downsampled to 16kHz, which I find to be the best compromise between sample quality and space. I also find that the C700 plugin helps with the sampling process as well.

When I remade Ice Crystal Cavern for the SNES back in September 2018 using SNESMod, I had everything, except the piano (which is at 8kHz), downsampled to 16kHz (even for the percussion) because I was mainly concerned about space:

These days, I realize that I could've downsampled the percussion to 32kHz so they can be more crisp. After this, I did experiment with SNESMod just a bit, but more recently, I've been picking it up a lot. These days, I'm pretty much doing something that I've always wanted to do back in 2014. Doing this, I've decided to make a mini SNES album with 5-tracks. I intend this mini album to sort of be a midpoint between my last album (The Final Bits) and my PC-98 album. The comments of BinaryCounter and kulor really helped me into getting the most out the SNES (shoutouts to them). Album has since been completed, and it will be released on my Bandcamp on May 11.

And that's about it. This page will be updated as I work on my mini SNES album. Thanks for reading and have a nice day!