Things I Would Have Done Differently

I can really think of only one major mistake that I made in the development of the Worms Blast music, and that was to sample all my instruments at 44.1 kHz, like I've always done. Through my years of writing and producing music, I've gotten used to always starting out with files of the highest possible fidelity and then downgrading as and when necessary to save resources. I assumed that the music would play back at 44.1 kHz in-game. My plan was to keep the most "fidelity-demanding" instruments, such as sparkly keyboards, hihats, shakers, transparent and open pads, etc., in 44.1 kHz but downgrade other samples, such as bass sounds, etc., to a lower sample rate to save system resources.

However, several months later I was told that the audio engine in the game would only run at 22.05 kHz. So, having some samples in 44.1 kHz would be a waste of resources since it would, in effect, be resampled to 22.05 kHz at the point of delivery. It turned out that I might as well have done all of my samples in 22.05 kHz from the beginning, as I had to downgrade everything to 22.05 kHz in order not to waste system resources with 44.1 kHz samples.

With DirectMusic Producer version 8.0, there was no easy way to resample samples. I had to go back to my original sample sources, use SoundForge to resample to 22.05 kHz, save each sample to a new filename, and then go back to DirectMusic Producer and highlight the sample, choose Replace Sample, and then find the newly saved 22.05 kHz sample on my hard drive. This may not sound so bad, but many of my instruments had many regions with separate samples — not to mention my sliced loops, which could have up to 20 stereo samples (which DirectMusic Producer at the time treated as two separate samples), making it necessary to perform this time-consuming procedure to 40 separate samples, just for a single instrument.

Actually, it was after this process that I managed to convince the DirectMusic developers to put a "resample" feature in DirectMusic Producer, something that was available from version 8.1 — too late for me, but at least I feel I can take some credit for getting that feature included for others to benefit from.

I guess the moral of the story is when working with DirectMusic, forget your old method of always working on a copy of your music in the best possible fidelity and then downgrade as and when necessary. Instead, find out the sample rate that the end product is going to be delivered at before you do any sampling at all, and use that as your highest frequency.