Correct timing of looped music by auri at 9:02 AM EST on January 7, 2015
Hey people, nice to be here!
TLDR: How do you correctly time vgm that only exists in loops? Is there a standard like 2 repetitions and a 10 second fade-out?
LONGER VERSION: I got into listening to lossless vgm a few days ago and am still blown away about the fact that I can listen to highest quality vgm from 1989 nintendo games. Thanks for all the work everyone of you puts into this!
I do not understand timing correctly. Is 2 loops the standard? Or if any number of times – wouldn't you want every track to at least play for a minute so it's not only a snippet? I found several timed USF and NSF files from games which had tracks playing for 1 minute, the next one for 8 minutes and so on. Is that because people strictly follow a scheme? Wouldn't you want the tracks to have roughly the same length like on a "normal" music album?
Thank you very much in advance for helping me with this. I am excited about having all the old soundtracks in FLAC now!
I have a track in which the loop is only 6 seconds long. I do not have to apply the rule every time, right? I would make the track 40 seconds long maybe.
Are you intending to upload your work for others? I don't really see why you should be concerned about what to do if you're not, and even still I'd just say to use your judgement. When timing NSFes or something, I almost always give tracks longer than 10 seconds to fade, usually around 20 because I think 10 is most often too abrupt. I try to make it where it makes the most musical sense.
I think it is always good to know and learn the rules first. I can still derive from them later if I want to. I am timing an N64 soundtrack for myself right now because I do not like the timing provided.
Trying everything out, 10 second fades seems okay for me. It all depends – track length, reptition, transitions. I am learning and it is fun. Noticing that it takes hours to time things :)
I am mostly concerned with the track lengths. Even if it is right by the "rules", I do not want to have 20 second jingles. For my taste every track needs to play at least a minute.