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Kong in Concert - Donkey Kong Country Arrangements

Posted by Hemos on Mon Sep 13, 2004 10:25 AM
from the good-things-to-listen-to dept.
Media Music Entertainment Games
Digital Coma writes "Kong in Concert, a project directed by myself and coordinated by familiar artists of the unofficial game music arrangement community, has been released at http://dkcproject.ocremix.org and spotlighted at OverClocked ReMix. Its purpose is to pay respects to the excellent Donkey Kong Country SNES soundtrack and honor its composers with 22 rearrangements (or ReMixes) of every song from the game in high quality MP3 and OGG. We also have a BitTorrent distribution of the album's whole WAV compilation. If you like the idea of free, non-commercial videogame remixes, check us out."
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  • WooHoo! (Score:5, Funny)

    by grunt107 (739510) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:28AM (#10236007)
    Where's my banana-shaped lighter?? ("Freebird, I mean "FreeChimp"!!)

  • One Question: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by goldspider (445116) <ardrake79@gmTEAail.com minus caffeine> on Monday September 13 2004, @10:28AM (#10236008) Homepage
    Did you have to pay any kind of lisencing fees to Nintendo? If so, how much did that cost?
    • And also, although the music is non-commercial, what's the licensing for the tracks that have been made available? Perhaps I've overlooked something but I've read the site and can't work out if they are available under a Creative Commons license or something similar.

    • Re:One Question: (Score:5, Informative)

      by aaron p. matthews (96130) on Monday September 13 2004, @01:32PM (#10238184) Homepage Journal
      Hi, I'm one of the guys who worked on this project. (I did the ice cave track)

      This project is not licensed. We didn't ask for permission.
      This is a project done by fans, for fans.

      Nintendo is 100% within their rights to send us a cease-and-desist order if they choose to. However, Nintendo has shown no animosity towards such projects in the past and I suppose they won't show any towards this one either.
      But who knows? just enjoy the music. :)

      cheers.

  • Quite Cool.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GolgOSatsumA (645361) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:29AM (#10236017)
    Need some clarification, though; does this mean my band can do a cool cover version of the theme without worry?

  • Free? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ideatrack (702667) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:29AM (#10236024)
    I know this is probably a very simple question, but if you're taking someone else's work and remixing it, doesn't that mean you have some obligation to the original composer? What's to prevent Nintendo from sending in the lawyers to stop this?

    Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is a bad idea or anything, (it's not my thing) but just wanted some clarification...

    • Re:Free? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cjpez (148000) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:41AM (#10236141) Homepage Journal
      (I'm not them, of course, but...)
      doesn't that mean you have some obligation to the original composer?
      Yep.
      What's to prevent Nintendo from sending in the lawyers to stop this?
      Nothing.

      It's the same situation as ProdigyRemixed.com [prodigyremixed.com]... I believe that getting permission from the artists whose work has been sampled is quite mandatory in order to stay in compliance with the law. A lot of this underground remixing-for-free stuff seems to do pretty well and not get prosecuted, but you're right, there's really nothing stopping the lawyers from (at the least) sending a C+D, or (at the worst) suing their asses into oblivion.

      Here's hoping they don't do that, though. If they're smart they'll realize that, while it's a clear case of copyright infringement, there's no way this is going to cut into their actual product sales at all.

      • RIAA (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Venner (59051)
        Here's hoping they don't [sue], though. If they're smart they'll realize that, while it's a clear case of copyright infringement, there's no way this is going to cut into their actual product sales at all.


        Sure. 'Cause the RIAA feels the same way about P2P filesharing, I'm sure. I'll buy that piracy - real piracy - in Asia & Eastern Europe is cutting into their [hugely inflated] profit margin, but not P2P, remixes. etc.

      • Re:Free? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by SCHecklerX (229973) <slshdt@freefall.homeip.net> on Monday September 13 2004, @11:23AM (#10236553) Homepage
        Interesting, I just read of something similar happening in the demoscene yesterday when I decided to rebuild my old mod collection. Apparently there was some guy who was performing purple motion's (future crew) old stuff, and selling it as his own.

        More about it here: http://www.modarchive.com/rippers.shtml [modarchive.com]

    • The Commodore 64 remix scene is very active, in fact there was a live C64 remix concert in London, UK last Saturday (Sept 11th), and a fantastic event it was too.

      It was organised by a guy called Chris Abbott, and his company C64Audio.com [c64audio.com] now represents many of original 1980's C64 musicians and licenses their music. To date he's paid over £20,000 in royalites to the original musicians.

      So the C64 scene shows you can have a vibrant remix community, whilst giving credit to the original composers and
    • For Project Majestic Mix, a fan-tribute album for Final Fantasy music (http://www.kfssstudios.com/), the people needed to get what is called a mechanical license, which is a royalty-based license when someone wants play rearranged/remixed versions of the original music.
    • Why would they? It's not like they're making money off of these tracks, and it's not like Nintendo is losing anything.

      Overclocked Remix [ocremix.org] has been around for a few years, and I don't think they've ever had a lawsuit.
      • I've seen hundred (if not thousand) of game sountracks sold on audio CDs (imported from Japan) and Nintendo could say they lose money because of these projects. And for the licensing issues, it's purely commercial: you can't remix Britney Spears for free, you can't remix Nintendo (or Sony...) for free.

  • Draft CowboyNeal... (Score:5, Funny)

    by D-Cypell (446534) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:29AM (#10236029)
    Perhaps the /. community could support this project by having Cowboy Neal stand on a tall ledge and throw barrells at people.

  • I never realized there was a following... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Andorion (526481) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:30AM (#10236034)
    I had no idea other people thought the DKC music was good - I used to leave my SNES on, sit idle in various levels, and blast the music through the stereo with the TV off.

    No joke.
    • He made the music for DKC and DKC2... some of the best stuff to ever come out of a SNES, _ever_.

      I'm surprised he hasn't released any solo CDs, because he's awesome.

  • Game music (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zorilla (791636) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:31AM (#10236043)
    This is one game that I believe had underrated music. I'll have to check this out when I get home. OCRemix has a streaming radio station at oc.ormgas.com [ormgas.com], if you don't mind all the Final Fantasy and Sonic music they play.

    Also, for Commodore/Atari ST fans, there's Nectarine Radio. [scenemusic.net]

    • Re:Game music (Score:4, Informative)

      by spellraiser (764337) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:47AM (#10236199) Journal
      I feel obliged to plug one of my favorite bands here.

      If you haven't heard of Machinae Supremacy [machinaesupremacy.com] yet, I recommend you check them out. They are a very cool Swedish band who mix different styles, play with synths a lot, and are self-professed gaming nuts.

      In the current context, The Great Gianna Sisters [machinaesupremacy.com] is particularily salient. It's a remix of / tribute to the theme song of the C64 game of the same name. Excellent stuff.

      • I actually have them in my CD changer in my car, although I've had to give that CD a break because I can only stand the lead singer's harsh voice for so long. Naturally, my favorites are the ones without lyrics, such as the Giana Sisters remix, SIDology (Part 1, I think, the one that starts off as Cybernoid II), and Anthem Apocolyptica.

  • Relics of the Chozo (Score:5, Informative)

    by D'Arque Bishop (84624) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:32AM (#10236061)
    This isn't the first time the Overclocked Remix guys have come together to make a tribute album for a Super Nintendo game. I highly recommend checking out Relics of the Chozo [ocremix.org], which is their soundtrack tribute to the game Super Metroid. VERY good stuff, if I do say so myself.

    Just my $.02...
    • I wish they'd distribute in MP3 as well as OGG. Rant about open standards all you like, but having to remember to install an extra codec on a clean machine, as well as having to push OGG on anyone who I'd like to send a sample to (i have several ocremix fan friends) is a hassle
      • Get the WAV files from, the Bittorrent and encode them yourself. Quite frankly, I don't trust other people to encode MP3s properly. I use the recommended LAME from Hydrogen Audio.
    • This isn't the first time the Overclocked Remix guys have come together to make a tribute album for a Super Nintendo game.

      Indeed, and that's why it's so strange this got a Slashdot story. ocremix.org/remix.overclocked.org has been hosting any number of similar projects for years now (since 2000 at least).

      A story to the effect, "hey look, someone remixed an SNES soundtrack!" at this point seems a bit silly.
  • Has to be one of my fave video game music tracks. In fact any game that bears even a remote resemblence to Mule has me "boink-a-dink-a"ing the soundtrack while I play. If you're familiar with the game, then the "boink-a-dink-a" comment won't sound quite as odd it would otherwise. Well, okay, it still sounds odd, but hey...

  • " 22 rearrangements (or ReMixes) of every song " (Score:3, Funny)

    by Andorion (526481) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:34AM (#10236077)
    FYI: It's 1 re-arrangement of each of the 22 songs, not 22 of each song like I anticipated when I followed the link =P

  • No FLACs? (Score:4, Informative)

    by abischof (255) * <alexNO@SPAMspamcop.net> on Monday September 13 2004, @10:35AM (#10236087) Homepage

    We also have a BitTorrent distribution [ocremix.org] of the album's whole WAV compilation.

    If their goal is to allow people to burn a CD of their work (which would appear to be the case), why not distribute FLACs as well? For those unaware, FLAC [sourceforge.net] is an open source codec which stands for "Free Lossless Audio Codec". It's like WAVs in that it's lossless but the files are much smaller since they're compressed :).

    • Re:No FLACs? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Venner (59051)

      For those unaware, FLAC is an open source codec which stands for "Free Lossless Audio Codec". It's like WAVs in that it's lossless but the files are much smaller since they're compressed :).

      Eh, not much smaller. About 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the wave. Still, that's 2-3x the number of losslessly ripped albums you can store. I rip FLAC for my favorite albums, and Ogg for everything else. And yes, I do hear the difference over by 24/96 sound card, nice HK receiver, & good speakers*.

      *my friend had me do a b

  • "If you like the idea of free, non-commercial videogame remixes, check us out."

    translates to:

    "If you want to hear the one genre of music guaranteed not to get you laid, check us out."

  • Was the concert produced by... (Score:5, Funny)

    by scotay (195240) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:40AM (#10236128)
    ...P. Diddy Kong?

  • If you want the entire original soundtrack... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Andorion (526481) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:41AM (#10236138)
    Try here: http://www.zophar.net/zsnes/spc/ [zophar.net]

    Then go here for the Winamp SPC plugin: http://www.zophar.net/utilities/spc.html [zophar.net]

  • Licensing issues (Score:4, Interesting)

    by davidwr (791652) on Monday September 13 2004, @10:44AM (#10236163) Homepage Journal
    I hate to be a wet blanket, and a redundant one at that, but unfortunately, this is a derivative work and as such the original owners can demand royalties.

    The USA has a concept called "mandatory licensing" when it comes to music. This means for some uses, such as using clips from many pieces in a compilation work or playing a song on the air, the owners cannot STOP you outright. However, they can demand payment.

    There was a case in the '40s or '50s or maybe early '60s where an artist took clips from a bunch of other songs and made a compilation work. The rights-holders of the original works sued to block it. The new work's artist claimed free speech and claimed Congress could not create a copyright law that would infringe his right to be creative. The US Supreme Court basically said no, Congress could not create a law to STOP him from being creative, but that the original artists were entitled to compensation.

    Source: Some radio program in the last year or two. I think I heard it on a public radio station but don't quote me on that.

    The bottom line:
    Assuming this is still the law, Nintendo may come after you, but if you've got the money to pay them off you can make them go away and keep distributing your creative work.
    Nintendo may be able to prevent you from distributing in or to certain other countries, I don't know the law worldwide.

        • If I recall correctly, the music store gets about a third of the sale price. The songwriter (who is not always the recording artist) and his publisher get the statutory 8.5 cents. The codec developer gets a few cents. The record label gets the rest and (allegedly pretends to) give some to the recording artist.

  • under australian copyright law afaik, this is legal as long as a maximum of 10% of the original work is used, anything more and they'll owe rights.

  • Commodore64 videogame remixes (Score:4, Informative)

    by dabadab (126782) on Monday September 13 2004, @11:09AM (#10236407)
    If you happen to be a C= fan, then check out http://remix.kwed.org/ [kwed.org] for some great stuff.
    There's also a webradio of this stuff: Slay Radio [c64.org]
  • I downloaded all the tracks directly (BT was going very slow, and I'm impatient) and am listening to them right now. I'm impressed. Some of them don't sound like they were done on synths, they sound orchestrated.

    Anyways, since all the tracks from the game are in this mix, why not hack or devise some way to be able to play the orginal game to this new music?

    I've done some light ROM hacking before and I don't even know if this is possible, but I'm just saying, it would be cool to have the new music in the
    • By "Hack or devise some way to be able to play the original game to this new music", do you mean "turn down the tv volume and turn up the stereo volume"? That's the layman's solution -- we all use it to play real heavy metal over games with nu-metal or "hello kitty on speed"-type soundtracks. It's almost as good as putting heavy metal tapes in Teddy Ruxpin dolls.
  • It would be nice if they had made torrents for the mp3 and ogg files as well. I don't have any download the entire set as wav files, but downloading each song one-by-one is a pain. And now that it's been slashdotted, the mirrors are getting slow, too. I downloaded the first few before this was posted, but now they're really starting to crawl.

  • Sound sample conservation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Zorilla (791636) on Monday September 13 2004, @11:12AM (#10236438)
    The one thing I found interesting about Donkey Kong Country's music is that a lot of the samples that were sound effects in the game were also music samples. These included the piano, which was the jingle when you got an extra life as well as the lead instrument in the first level. Another example I can think of is the heavy, metallic sounds in the industrial level music which also served as the sound the mine cart made when you landed back on the tracks.

  • The only postive post (Score:4, Insightful)

    by genner (694963) on Monday September 13 2004, @11:39AM (#10236746)
    I can't believe you people, you call yourself nerds and dont' even have one nice thing to say about this. These people are releaseing some awsome music.Are you such slaves to the top 40 charts that you can't see that? I for one welcome our DJ Pretzel overlord.
    • Another band that does this is The Advantage - they have lots of older Nintendo games done with instruments instead of synth. The Duck Takes game song brings a tear to my eye every time I hear it :-D

    • Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kogase (811902) on Monday September 13 2004, @11:09AM (#10236415)
      I doubt a group making and giving away video game remixes would pay for an ad on Slashdot. And besides, computers have been around for a while, but you probably won't be complaining when they anounce the next 128-bit Ultra-Super-Duper-Amanamegatron CPU.
    • If you think all game music is repetitive MIDI stuff on a level with Pong...Then you haven't listened to the right games. There are many, many titles out there with wonderful music - often RPG's(Final Fantasy series, Xenogears, Chrono Trigger, etc.), and some of the newer fighting and action games will have decent rock-type soundtracks as well.

      Experiment a bit, listen to tracks on places like OCRemix, you might be suprised what you find.

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