How to Resurrect a Musical Relic from the Doom Era
About a week ago I remembered some of my memories of playing Doom way back in 1994. When Doom first came out I was enamored. Never before has a game drug me into a virtual word. I played it for hours until I completed it. Left with nothing to do I went exploring what little Internet there was at the time to find more. There I found all kinds of mods to extend the game. One of them that I remember fondly was simply known as "nin.wad". This little trinket replaced all the Doom 2 music with Nine Inch Nails music. However since at the time there were no mp3s and wav files were unreasonably large, Doom music was MIDI music. MIDI music from 1994 had a distinct video game sound. NIN music not only made Doom game play better, it allowed me to hear one of my favorite artists in a new medium.
I decided to lookup the nin.wad and see what I could do with it in these modern times. It took me a while to find it because I couldn't remember the exact name. I found plenty of maps from the time that used music from the wad, but not the wad itself. I eventually figured out that it was packaged as nin.zip, which made it easy to find.
I used ZipZag to extract the wad's contents. ZipZag has a great idea: build an application that has every archive extractor possible. It's just poorly implemented. However, it did get the job done.
Doom's music is actually in a format called mus. In order to turn mus files into midi files I had to find another ancient DOS program called mus2midi. Finding this program reminded me of ftp.cdrom.com, once a large repository of shareware. Now it just seems to be ad induced nausea. Mus2midi was easy to use to convert the tracks. I first used the default tempo of 192, but reduced it to 140 which sounds more accurate.
So now I had a bunch of midi files. Each one named for the map it was played on. Names like D_ADRIAN, D_AMPIE, and D_BETWEE. In other words, not very useful. I took the time to listen to each track and identify which Nine Inch Nails song it actually was. I was able to identify all but one (D_COUNTD and D_ROMERO are the same track). If you can identify it, let me know.
The next step was to convert the tracks into Ogg Vorbis. The idea seemed simple,
but not worth the $20 or more crap software was charging to do the task. So I booted up
Ubuntu and installed Timidity. Conversion was rather simple. All I needed
to run was timidity -OvS *.MID.
Take a listen and see if you can name this famous tune.
- Tip:
- Windows users can use Windows Media Player to play the tracks, even if Windows says it can't find a compatible player. Peculiar huh?
The music is a pretty good recreation of the original considering programs like wav2midi didn't exist at the time. I image it was done with a synthesizer. It's hard to tell because the author didn't leave his mark. I can't find it anywhere and it appears no one else was able to either.
If you'd like to listen to all the tracks I've included the original nin.zip, the midi files, and the ogg files for your listening pleasure. Hopefully it will remind you of a gaming era long gone, allow you to hear some favorite tunes in a new way, or introduce you to music you've never heard.
Download
Download the music.
Posted by mthorn on 8/23/2006