Why do so many romhacks skip out on custom music?

poo poo pee pee

I'm gonna assume the answer is that there's more artists out there than musicians? Certainly the amount of knowledge and work involved in making sprite edits is way less than is required to edit music, let alone create a new tune from scratch.

^ That, and the fact that music hacking is generally finicky. For years all we had was Sappy which is... well... horrible.

Music hard.

Graphic easy.

Unga bunga

All of the above, plus one more thing in my view. Lots of players play while speeding up and therefore mute their game, or mute their game regardless. Therefore, the sound/music of the game will have less urgency than the graphics for a romhacker.

Every player of a romhack experiences the graphics, but not every player experiences the music/sound.

Music Composition, or even Music insertion is a skill that some find hard to start on, or even master.

It's much easier to use what's already there!

I've always wanted custom music in my hack, but I don't know anything about music, and there aren't many musicians... :(
So, I've just been stealing music from other games.

We indeed exist, we're just few and far between because we get snapped up in other projects. I should really zip up all my Pokemon Crystal sound engine songs and get them uploaded for free use.
https://soundcloud.com/monstarules

You lot have inspired me to start making music using Pokemon GBA Soundfonts.

Check back with me in a month or so, I'll have some tracks for people to use. :)

Pretty sure there are as many musicians and composers as there are designers. Most have relied on Sappy for several years, and was a rather unstable program, with bugs, due to the limitations that Visual Basic 6 had. That's pretty much why some people gave up trying to learn how to hack music into the game, or even replace any sound data in general.

Now that we have GBA Music Studio, which is designed to replace Sappy altogether, things are about to change! It will make music editing a whole lot easier, and since it's written in C#, there's less limitations and more functionality to open, export, import and compile MIDIs and export, import and replace soundfonts (aka samples/waves). There's also plans for GBA Music Studio to have functionality with all the decompilation (aka Pret) projects as well. It also has support for Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga sound format.

As time goes on, more and more people will be interested in creating original music from scratch or even remix music from other games.

Even though Sappy and GBA Music Studio are both open source, I really do see GBA Music Studio being used much more often, as one of the easiest to use as well, and continuously improved with more sound engines supported.

Maybe people are skipping out on music because for some reason this site is banning the pokemon romhack with the best and most extensive custom soundtrack ever...

aaaa- said:

Maybe people are skipping out on music because for some reason this site is banning the pokemon romhack with the best and most extensive custom soundtrack ever...

Click to expand...

Care to elaborate?

Karl said:

Care to elaborate?

Click to expand...

Pokémon Clover is getting thrown off the site

This thread appears to have been created with the intent of eventually being derailed to fuel an unrelated topic. ROM Hacking Discussions is not the venue to discuss this matter.

Thanks for contributions from those interested; for anyone interested in continuing the subject matter of custom music, please continue the discussion in a new thread.