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ULTIMATE MUSIC
DEMO
8730
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Grazey of Psycho Hacking Force is one of the biggest chipmusic fan around the ST
scene and since 1987, he collected and extracted tunes from all the games, demos
and others productions he could find. Having already released lots of music
-disks which compiled some of his ripped archives, he decided to strike hard by
creating this gigantic beast...
The Ultimate Music Demo 8730 is composed of 4646 ST YM tunes, making it
certainly the biggest music-disk available on any platform around.
[The Intro]
So it's coming with a long ST music history intro, based on a 21 minutes music
-medley! The story is synchronized with the music and it's resulting in a
description of events associated with the different themes covered in the
medley, such as infos on the production where it comes from, on its authors, or
about the composer.
A historical fresco is displayed at the bottom of the screen representing the
world history from 1980 to 2000 with some excerpts of it, like Pong, the
DowJones collapse, or the Hubble telescope. A small arrow is moving at the top
of it and shows the approximative release period of the currently commented
tune.
In a window over the story text, some pictures of the concerned productions are
displayed and even some effects and animations from those, like the Suretrip
mapping part or the speaking face from Xenon. It looks really great!
The medley itself is made by Tao who is in my opinion the one who had the best
habilities to do it, between all the active ST musicians, as he was already
present at the beginning of the ST scene and because he already made tons of
covers. Also he's not a bad musician. ;P The themes are faithfully reproduced
and nicely spiced up with the neat Tao effects. Notice that it's not a totaly
continuous medley because there's a "fade out fade in", in the middle.
So the story and medley begin with Federation of Free Traders game, progress
through the years and end with Sweety and Breath demos. The synchronisation is
perfect, making this intro a interesting and relaxing show.
[The Music-Disk]
The collection is ordered by authors' names in a window with an alphabetical
panel at the top of it for fast positioning. There's another window for the
author's musics selection. Real name, nationality and a grey dithered photo of
the author are displayed if known. For the multi-tunes archives (these are
mostly for games soundtracks) the sub-tune number is displayed and you need to
re-click on the archive name to listen the next tune. Personnaly, i would have
prefered some next and previous icons to navigate through the archive. Also the
mouse response is quite fast and sometimes it jumps over a song. But anyway the
browsing is good considering the enormous size of the library.
The listening is like every classic ST music-disks, the song is looped again and
again as long as you don't select a new one. In fact i don't think that many
music replay routines (if any) can tell when the music is finished, so having
the tune played for its original duration would require the manual storage of
each 4646 tunes' duration, a too long process to be done in my opinion. :)
The graphics are nice, i especially like the "urban stereo" and its equalizers.
Concerning the collection itself ? Oh, it's just the tunes from (the) 180 ST
musicians including some previously unreleased ones, nothing more. ;) How many
hours of listening ? Who could tell (perhaps the mad-guy who would write down
all the tunes durations ;) ?! But at least, i think that there are certainly are
tons of. ;D
[Respect]
All the titanic work from Grazey on this compilation has reached its goal of
definitive collection (well okay, until no new tunes were released ;). Now you
don't need to boot anything but the UMD8730 to listen your favorites YM tunes.
Also the intro is so great and interesting that it could have been released
alone as a big production.
Not just great and complete, ULTIMATE!
[>-------------------------------------------------------) 30/10/02 Dma-Sc (--<]
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