High Quality Music Fix Mod

[banbeano]

I just released a mod to fix the music sound quality of LOM. I am a big fan of the original sound track, but the version that was in the game release is of poor quality (Noticeable background hiss, very heavily compressed, etc.). Some time ago the original composer Kith Zizza released a remastered version of games soundtrack to Youtube. After a long time of trial and error testing I was able to use the remastered versions as a base for new high quality sound files to use in the game. I've tested it a fair bit and have found no issues running it. I recommend turning off the ambient sounds when using the new soundtrack as it drowns it out.

www.moddb.com/games/lords-of-magic-special-edition/addons/lords-of-magic-high-quality-music-fix

Hope you guys enjoy!

[lemminkainen]

Haha I did exactly the same thing as you did as soon as Keith uploaded these on Youtube. It's a great idea to share with others! What I did, too, was to include the "World" theme at the end of each faith theme so that it gets played from time to time when you linger a long time on Urak view without battles.

[banbeano]

That's a cool idea lemminkainen, I hadn't thought of that. I kept it as a vanilla as possible for compatibility reasons and to make it a drop-in mod. The battle music especially is temperamental due to its dynamic nature, and I tried to make it as one-to-one as I could.

I would love to do a full restore of all the audio in the game, but as far as I'm aware all the original development files from Impressions games (code, audio, video, etc.) are lost. Without clean audio masters it is very difficult to clean the audio up. I was honesty surprised when Kith Zizza posted the remastered music, as I thought most everything had been lost. I'm glad he did post the files, but I wish there was more to work with.

[Boaster]

One modification I did to my LOMSE was make the menu music run faster. Seemed kind of slow otherwise.

[lemminkainen]

I use "extended menu" for menu: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrTuVU1C2iM

On the other hand I used Keith's "menu" music as an add on for Death track since it sounds so creepy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=t55RsJTwxcI

And also "World (extended)" at the end of each faith's track, as I said earlier: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEz0eVYmEXY

This way, every Keith's track gets used in my game.

[banbeano]

I thought about making the music modular by providing multiple optional tracks, but that ended up going outside the scope of what I wanted to accomplish with the mod. I use the "extended menu" music in the mod already, as the editing it down to the original was much more complicated then was worth the effort. Where I could I just used the provided tracks from Youtube as is, as it speed up development. I had everything but the battle music done for a while, but the battle music required a lot of tinkering to get the working correctly. The LOM engine unfortunately does have some limitations on how high of quality files you can get it to play, and in the case of the battle music you can't mix and match 8bit and 16 bit WAV files. Maybe down the road I will make an "Extended Cut" mod that adds in some extra content, but for now I am happy that I was able to accomplish what I did.