New songs for the jukebox - Suggestions for tracks?

[MalMalumam]

With the hopefully-maybe-being-merged-at-some-point diner I'm submitting to the github, I felt like it would be really cool to add some new music to the jukebox.  There's very few songs on it, and even fewer on the phonograph.  The primary constraint is file size - every time a new piece of music is included, players have to download it into their cache.  I've made a pull request to shave about 25 megabytes off of the Aurorastation cache; if that gets accepted, we'll have room for some more songs.

That being said - I wanted to ask, do people think that we should have new songs in the jukebox?  And which songs should be included?  What sort of music or genres should be available in the bar/diner's jukebox?

Important things to keep in mind:

• File size.  We generally want to convert all music to .ogg (vorbis) format, as these are the most compact recording files that BYOND can read (occasionally mp3 beats it, but not often from my experience).  My approach is to download and install Audacity, import (File->Import...) the music I want to compress, change the bitrate down to 22050 if it's higher than that (Project Bitrate in the lower left hand corner), and export it (File->Export...) as .ogg (vorbis), using quality option 0.  Depending on the song, this can get 1-4 minutes of music packed into a megabyte, with basically no quality loss.  It is quite possible to get smaller file sizes, and feel free to experiment with e.g. 8000 bitrates, but be aware that it will generally degrade the quality at least to a small degree.  But the smaller the file is, the less of a burden it is to include it, so...
   
• The other option is to use chiptune-style file formats.  The ones that BYOND can read are .midi, .mid, .mod, .it, .s3m, .xm, and .oxm.  These don't record an entire song in its entirety, but just have an arrangement of notes (and sometimes instrument sound sets).  These are the stuff that those atrocious violin and piano "songs" are made of, but they are also capable of producing quite good-working songs- for example, one already in the game, clouds.s3m (attachments), or this .midi of "He's a Pirate" from Pirates of the Caribbean that I plugged into the jukebox in my test server and recorded (attachments.)
   
• Licensing.  We must ensure that the song we want to include has a license that lets us do so.  From what I understand, this means it is public domain, is under one of several kinds (but not all) of Creative Commons licenses, or that the artist has given permission for its reuse.  The licensing information needs to be submitted with the music so that we can record it in the licensing file in the music folder

So with all that - what do you think?  Got some (low-file-size) songs you'd like to include?  Submit them here!

Helpful resources for finding songs that have compatible licenses:

• Reddit: A List of Royalty Free Music : letsplay
• Reddit: What are your fav free royalty free music sites/artists? : Filmmakers
• Reddit: List of Free Music Resources: NoCopyrightMusic
• View by License search for .mod files
• A collection of public domain jazz recordings
• Sim Gretina, who licenses their work under an attribution license. The phonograph already uses some of their work.
• A composer's collection of royalty-free music they made.
• A database of public domain songs.
• The Mutopia Project, a collection of a couple thousand songs' sheet music, available in MIDI.
• This article mentions some websites that have compatible licenses with their MIDIs.
• Some other web sites with royalty-free music.
• EDIT 9/24:  more resources below!
• Three cool real-music open-license websites:
  https://prosearch.tribeofnoise.com/search/index
  https://freemusicarchive.org/
  https://publicdomain4u.com/public-domain-genres/
• Classical music MIDIs: http://www.jsbach.net/midi/
• I found a bunch of ... very old websites with original MIDIs on them that *may* be usable...?  Ask if you want the list of them; I have them bookmarked.
• All original music from here is free to use.  http://www.mightymidi.com/
• Public domain MIDI songs.  Might be able to find some other music on this website too. https://opengameart.org/content/original-midi-album
• These MIDIs are published under CC 3.0 NC SA:  http://fredrikj.net/music/ https://milkytracker.org/downloads/
• A vast collection of websites, many of which may or may not work: http://www.synthzone.com/midifile.htm
• Another reference website: http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/PublicDomainMusic.html
• An AI program you can use to generate your own MIDIs by prompting it with samples (copyright status uhh... ...?) https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/
• Attribution-only license MIDIs:  https://patrickdearteaga.com/arcade-music/
• Yet another reference website:  https://libguides.libraries.wsu.edu/creativecommons/audio
• And another: https://inspiredpublic.com/audio/
• I... think these could be used for our purposes...?  http://funkyremixes.com/
• Compositions released under CC BY 4.0:  https://www.scottbuckley.com.au/2015/01/my-music-library-is-now-licensed-under-cc-by-4-0-that-means-free-for-commercial-use-youre-welcome/
• One more reference website for the pile: https://www.musicoutfitters.com/soundimage.htm
• By manually typing in "midi" into the tag= in the search bar, I got the tag search on this website to find the midi files here (under public domain): http://beta.ccmixter.org/stems?tags=midi
• A good chunk of this guy's music is made free under Creative Commons:  https://soundcloud.com/stevenobrien/

clouds.s3m

Edited September 24, 2020 by MalMalumam

[Carver]

I really hope this wouldn't up the resource file download size by much.

[MalMalumam]

@Carver If the admins find my size-reduction PR acceptable, then it definitely shouldn't, and we may end up with a smaller resource file if not all the space made is used up.

MIDIs can be pretty darn small, like 10-50KB (though they can be larger).  Sticking to that size, we could easily fit 20 songs in a single megabyte.

[Kintsugi]

If size is a concern, you'd be better off removing some songs we have that aren't particularly good. Anyway, Bay has a very good song called "phoron will make us rich", which I've always loved. I'd say the hardest part about finding recommendations is finding songs that feel like they belong in our setting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4goUdEQ5ifA

 

[MalMalumam]

@DanseMacabre Honestly I think the songs we have are either good, or we shouldn't remove from the codebase due to how iconic the songs are.  (Or they aren't implemented anywhere, but may be used for events, I guess? IDK.)  But even just compressing the main jukebox+recordplayer songs has given us 20MB. 

Compressing the songs using my method is a given IMO since it doesn't degrade quality in way I can notice.  I listened to each one.  (Though I didn't listen to each ambience I altered.)

[MalMalumam]

Updated main post with additional resources, mostly focused on MIDIs.