Voyetra MusiClips and Word Rescue

[Malvineous]

Hi all,

For a while now I've been trying to get hold of a product Voyetra used to sell called MusiClips. This was a collection of a few hundred royalty free songs available for purchase in the early 90s.

The reason this interests me is because for a while I suspected - and now I have confirmation - that Word Rescue (and perhaps other games) used these songs for their music. Typically the songs were cut down or reduced in some way, so I think it would be very interesting to get hold of the original songs to hear what they sound like.

After having no luck for a long time, I finally found the first hint of MusiClips just now. There is a song called BLUESY1.MID that I found on this website that is actually the original Voyetra version of the third song in the shareware version of Word Rescue.

I was quite excited by this discovery, but unfortunately none of the other songs on that page are the ones used in Word Rescue, so I believe it's an incomplete collection of the MusiClips songs.

I just wanted to share this discovery and let anyone know that if you ever come across either MusiClips or a large collection of .mid files that were all made by Voyetra, please let me know!

[Litude]

Did you try checking MIDI collections for Voyetra files? It seems Voyetra was quite good at tagging their MIDI files with a copyright notice, so I just looked through a few collections searching for the tag and zipped up the Voyetra MIDI files I found. Download it here.
It seems they revised the tracks a few times so it includes some revisions of tracks. There should be no byte-for-byte identical files here though, unless some duplicate managed to escape me.

There's a lot to listen to though, so I didn't check yet if there are any further tracks from Word Rescue.

EDIT: REDSHOES.MID is track 2.

[Malvineous]

Oh wow that's amazing you found another song!! I have gone through all the songs in your file twice over but can't find any other Word Rescue tunes.

I did find that SOLFEG.mid is the same piece of classical music used for the title music in Treasure Mountain (although as it's a well known piece it's unlikely the game took it from this collection.) Likewise MARINES.MID is the same tune as the Captain Comic intro ditty.

I have found some other MIDI collections so I plan to search for any files in there containing "Voyetra" and see if the last song from Word Rescue can be found!

[Hallfiry]

Likewise MARINES.MID is the same tune as the Captain Comic intro ditty.

Same song (Halls of Montezuma) or same midi?

[Malvineous]

Same song - Captain Comic only had PC speaker audio, no MIDI there!

[Litude]

Sorry for going a bit off-topic here, but I see that you've uploaded the MIDI files that Bobby Prince used to have on his website of the game to VGMPF. From where did you find these? Mainly wondering if you would happen to have the tracks of Realms of Chaos that used to be there. There's the track "Into The Throne Room" which doesn't seem to be in the game itself, unless it's an alternate title for e.g. the opening theme.

[Malvineous]

No worries - I downloaded every single track he had up there at the time. Here's a zip of them all, in case there are any others you need. The Realms of Chaos ones are in there. Maybe that particular song was cut? I just extracted all the songs from the beta version out of curiosity but it wasn't used there.

[Litude]

Awesome, thanks for sharing!

[spikey]

I found this tonight in an extensive search, obviously requires more extensive searching, but still..

http://mids.ru/find/?s=voyetra&z=0&f=0& ... 00000Piano

One thing I like is that the search results show all the MIDI text, like the instrument listings, which makes it easier to identify.

[Malvineous]

Oh wow that's pretty good! I wonder whether there's a way to download all the songs, because I think you'll have to listen to them to figure out whether they're a match or not!

[spikey]

Right, you'll have to listen to most.
Although, I just went through all of them and didn't find anything interesting.

Another page is here:
http://cd.textfiles.com/10000soundssongs/MID/GENERAL/
Redshoes.mid is there, identical to what we have. Of course, it won't be easy to go thru 10K MIDI's..
If you go back to the MID directory there's more. And more.. I checked a lot but didn't find anything..

Are the Math Rescue songs Voyetra too?

Also, I found Bluesy1.mid again in the program "Teach Me Piano Deluxe", but it was identical to the one you found, and no other WR tracks were in the other 40-odd MIDI's.



EDIT: I found one file which kinda sounds Rescue-y, maybe MR? Attached.

[Malvineous]

I think I've gone through quite a few of the 10000soundssongs ones, although I didn't find redshoes.mid so maybe I haven't looked through it closely enough. I hope you can find some matches!

I believe Bobby Price did all the Math Rescue music and also Word Rescue Plus, so there's only one song left from Word Rescue that we don't have the original .mid for, and that's the theme music. ez_blues.mid is a similar style to Math Rescue though which is interesting! But not Voyetra by the looks of it so not part of MusiClips either.

Interesting you found the songs in another program! It's quite surprising where they show up. If only someone had a copy of the original MusiClips package!

Do keep us posted if you find anything!

[spikey]

I believe Bobby Price did all the Math Rescue music

Maybe this attachment will change your mind?

Didn't find the WR one, but found a MR one. Who would have thought it? I found this one with Voyetra's AudioStation 32 software.

Still on the hunt..

[Malvineous]

Oh wow, there you go! Guess Bobby Prince didn't do all the Math Rescue music either!! Nice find