Zandronum

Hello !

First time poster. I am running Zandronum on Linux Mint 13.

Can somebody tell me how to install .ogg music?

I wish to install the music from this thread:

http://zandronum.com/forum/showthread.p ... light=.ogg

I notice the Ransu's music in this thread (for Doom 2) consists of lots of small files. What I would like to know how to install the music, and the best way to organise the music files on my system.

Commerical Wad's are installed to:

~/home/.zandronum/

Game Wad's I have installed:

Doom 2
Final Doom Plutonia Experiment
Final Doom: TNT Evilution
The Ultimate Doom
Heretic
Hexen
Hexen: Deathkings of The Citadel
Strife: Quest For The Sigil

So how do I
1) Install Ransu's music. URL: http://zandronum.com/forum/showthread.p ... light=.ogg

2) Organise the music on my system?

Thank you all for reading my first post, and look forward to any help anybody can give me on this :)

For the music on Ransu's page, open up the link to the songtrack that you want and do the .wad Download.
Then, make a folder in ~/home/.zandronum/ called Skins, and put that downloaded wad in ~/home/.zandronum/skins and it will replace the music of the game wad you downloaded.

For example, this is the DoomII music wad: http://www.mediafire.com/?uz7p980r6ed68b6
Just put it in the previously mentioned skins folder and your Doom II music will be replaced by those songs.

Just to warn you, every wad file you put in your Skins folder can increase load time.

Llewellyn wrote: For the music on Ransu's page, open up the link to the songtrack that you want and do the .wad Download.
Then, make a folder in ~/home/.zandronum/ called Skins, and put that downloaded wad in ~/home/.zandronum/skins and it will replace the music of the game wad you downloaded.

For example, this is the DoomII music wad: http://www.mediafire.com/?uz7p980r6ed68b6
Just put it in the previously mentioned skins folder and your Doom II music will be replaced by those songs.

Just to warn you, every wad file you put in your Skins folder can increase load time.

Thank you Llewellyn for the quick response that works well music at last. Hurrah !

Final question... can I use .ogg music files instead, and if so what is the benefit of using .ogg music files over a music .wad file?

You can use .ogg for client side music replacements, yes.
Edit: .wad is also a container format, that you can put files into. Software like Slade can open .wad files. Hope this clears things up.

.ogg is a container format, if it's for recorded music then it is basically using Ogg Vorbis for the digital sound encoder, as opposed to .wav or .flac or .mp3, or whatever else ZDoom supports for sound/music.
The benefit of .ogg is that it's between .wav and .mp3, the sound quality is good but the filesize is small. .flac is the same quality as .wav but a smaller filesize, but not as small as Ogg Vorbis .ogg files.

Regular Doom music over the years is usually not .wav or .mp3 or such, it's in old fashioned MIDI ("Musical Instrument Digital Interface") notation format that isn't an audio recording (instruments can sound different on different computers & sound cards). User wads usually have .mid music, while Doom itself uses its own .mus version of MIDI. Basically, people use .ogg music due to it being an actual recording, as opposed to just timed notes playing back on whatever sound card or synthesizer is attached to a computer. The benefit of .mid files is their incredibly small size, due to just being timed notes & volume/panning info, etc, while sacrificing direct control of how the instruments will exactly sound.

Examples of .mid instrument sounds:
Default Windows MIDI software synthesizer (Roland based): Strain Map17 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GqFosFiFhk

Old sound cards:
Old common SoundBlaster/Adlib/FM sound cards (early Yamaha based): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18TTxhoF_EI

Early 90s Roland MT32: Doom E1M1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUTcN-RlfpU
Mid-late 90s Roland Sound Canvas (sounds close to the default Windows MIDI synth): Doom E1M1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316i0uV32WE
Mid-late 90s Yamaha XG sound card: Doom E1M1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UODyfKhdyQg

Examples of recorded music (.mp3 .ogg or .flac)
Doom E1M1 from the official Doom soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSsfjHCFosw

More nerd info at DoomWiki: http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Music

I hope this has been informative!

retrotronic wrote: Thank you Llewellyn for the quick response that works well music at last. Hurrah !

Final question... can I use .ogg music files instead, and if so what is the benefit of using .ogg music files over a music .wad file?

That wad file I linked you actually holds the .ogg files. Wad is a file format that holds other files inside of it, kind of like a ZIP, but with no compression. So you are actually using the OGG files.