Background Music Recording

[elias4444]

I was just wondering what some of you more professional game developers do about your background music? I've already implemented an Ogg Vorbis system for the technical side, but what I'm really curious about is where you get your music from, or if you make it, how do you make it sound so good?

I figure, I can't just digitize my favorite CD track and use it since that would be a licensing issue - So, I've tried recording someone playing an instrument (very low tech, which produced too much background noise and not enough variation in instrumentation), as well as typing it into a music sheet program that produces MIDI output (which I then record and convert to Ogg, but has issues with good sounding instruments). What do you guys use? And how do you do it? Is there someplace out there that offers Royalty Free music? ANY help would be vastly appreciated.

Thanks.

[elias]

We've used Michael Huang from Gamenoise (http://gamenoise.com/) for the music in TT. He's good and his prices are reasonable.

One thing I can't stress enough when talking about musicians: Check that they're not a member of an organization that automatically owns all the copyrights to the music. That's a huge problem with Danish musicians since they're almost always members of the Danish music organization KODA.

- elias

[elias4444]

Thanks - I'm already checking out his website.  

Also, I'm learning that it takes a bit of money to really finish off these games I'm making, and it's starting to become a bit discouraging. Do you guys (those who've released games already) ever break even? Or, hopefully, actually make money out of this business of online distributed games? I'm probably just a few weeks away from release, but as I said, I'm starting to get worried.

[elias]

With an average game you should find it easy to recoup the direct costs (music, sound, web site etc.). The hard part is giving yourself a reasonable salary which requires a lot of sales. For comparison, Tribal Trouble has sold ~600 copies since the 1th of april from the internet.

- elias