Does it sound to anyone else, as though it is a type of EMU soundfont or from the Sound Blaster family?

Is the sound card in the PC you are playing those youtube videos from doing anything with the sound output.. such as an equalizer, surround, etc?

I turned off the adjustments my sound card is doing and it made it sound quite different then from what I have it set to all the time.

It also depends on if it was recorded with the SPDIF out, the line out, or the speaker out of the AWE32. Or maybe it was recorded with a mic. The recording settings and sound card on the computer it was recorded with could also make a difference.

The audio on youtube is also going to be compressed, so it is not going to sound quite like the original anyway.

cyclone3d wrote:

Is the sound card in the PC you are playing those youtube videos from doing anything with the sound output.. such as an equalize […]
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Is the sound card in the PC you are playing those youtube videos from doing anything with the sound output.. such as an equalizer, surround, etc?

I turned off the adjustments my sound card is doing and it made it sound quite different then from what I have it set to all the time.

It also depends on if it was recorded with the SPDIF out, the line out, or the speaker out of the AWE32. Or maybe it was recorded with a mic. The recording settings and sound card on the computer it was recorded with could also make a difference.

The audio on youtube is also going to be compressed, so it is not going to sound quite like the original anyway.

Hmmm. That is a good point about Youtube's compression, but even though they've probably taken a bit of a drop in quality, the songs themselves don't sound too much different (to me) from the Mp3 versions I heard way back when. Also, my on-board sound card isn't doing anything that I'm aware of. I'm using an HP Pavilion 500-023w, for what it's worth.

As far as how these were recorded, I couldn't say for sure. I doubt it was via a microphone or line-in, though it could have been...? Around the same time these would have been recorded, I remember making similar recordings from this very game (with WinGroove loaded) using nothing but the native "Windows Sound Recorder" that came standard at that time. IF I had to take a guess, I would say that the gentleman who recorded these, probably used a similar method. I first heard these as Mp3's in the early 2000's and they've only just been recently uploaded to YouTube within the past decade.

EDIT: Scratch what I said about reaching a dead-end with finding non-Youtube versions of these tracks. I found what I believe to be the source Mp3's here.

Here's the track from the level "Balloon Park", where the drums especially are really prominent. — I hear lots of presets from those old Emu Sound Fonts, but those drums are baffling me. The kick KIND of sounds like it's from the Roland SC, but it's difficult. There was a lot of reverb on these tracks, unfortunately. But then again, depending on the sound set you have, the midis from this game can be very reverb-heavy.

8MBGMSFX.sf2 is an official EMU font, came with some driver AFAIK. This is a variant, at least the similar name suggests so, that came also with some update/driver/installer. I'm unable to compare it right now, so I might be off completely with this: https://ufile.io/yys5u

Edit: did you try all included drumsets?

Rawit wrote:

8MBGMSFX.sf2 is an official EMU font, came with some driver AFAIK. This is a variant, at least the similar name suggests so, that came also with some update/driver/installer. I'm unable to compare it right now, so I might be off completely with this: https://ufile.io/yys5u

Edit: did you try all included drumsets?

I sure did. I tried every single kit, and no go. I noticed that for this game's soundtrack, much use was made of either the "Rock" or "Room" kits, and very rarely the "Standard" kits. I tried all of the kits, with extra focus on those specific kits and no such luck. Same result, when I just tried the one you uploaded there.

And even when I had actual Sound Blaster hardware to test this on, I couldn't make it happen. Somewhere I have/had an old Compaq desktop and I installed a Sound Blaster Live card, and loaded the 8mb and 8MBGMSFX soundfonts while testing different games and midis, and only came away with the same generic kits that everyone is familiar with from those Sound fonts. Not saying that there is anything particularly special about the sound I'm after, other than the fact that I really dig it. I tried sampling at least a few snares from some of these recordings and that just wasn't pretty.

I'm always creating music, and I'd just love to be able to try to get this specific set in my collection, if it's possible. I'm also designing a game, and I could really make use of this set, with some of the compositions I've laid out for said game. I'm just baffled that no one else seems to be familiar with it. If I thought it would help, I'd find the guy who recorded these initially, but he didn't have much for me even a decade ago. 😐

Sorry to bump this again,

But I did some digging around in my own arsenal of soundfonts and I found something that I forgot about. There's a soundfont called "Super8mb.sf2" that has only one drumkit —the Standard kit—, in which the only available snare sounds pretty much dead-on to the examples I've posted above. In fact, I'm pretty sure that is it. It just sounds a bit different, when there is no reverb.

The problem I have with this particular SF2 is that it's largely incomplete. The drum kit on this font has only one snare and one kick, and it is missing a few other drum sounds. Also, it's pretty much only the snare drum that is similar to the song samples I posted. Everything else is different, but in the tracks I posted above, I'm definitely hearing Emu 8mb presets for everything but the drums. For instance, "Synth Bass 2" is used a lot in these songs, and that preset is the same as the Emu soundfont, as well as the Sawtooth, Charang and so on. Another thing I noticed is that the kicks used in those songs sound like they came from a Roland SC set (as in the same kick from the Rock/Power drumset).

I also got my hands on a soundfont called "Finegm.SBK" (which I converted to SF2), which seems to have the other snare in its only drum kit. Back when I inquired to the guy who recorded them, he told me he recorded them directly from the game, with only a single soundfont (8MBGMSFX) loaded to his AWE32's memory. But I'm wondering if he used a more completed version Super8mb or something similar. Does anyone know if there exists another version Super8mb? Or perhaps if there is a set that mixes Emu presets with Roland drums? I've searched Google and found nothing. In those tracks, it sounds like someone mixed together Roland, Emu and some other type of drum kit. I hear Roland kicks, the Super8mb snare, FineGM snare, and Emu hats, cymbals and toms.

I actually was able to replicate on of the tracks above, using two different fonts for drums, in a DAW. Sorry for the amount of reverb on my version.

TL;DR does a similar set to "Super8mb" exist, or perhaps an altered version of Emu's 8mbGM set?

ETA: I can say with near confidence that those tracks I posted in the original post, were recorded directly from the game and not edited with various fonts. At the time that they were recorded, there was no real way to properly rip the actual midi data from the game. Granted there was an available midi set from the game floating around back then, but those midis were nearly impossible to edit at the time, because the gentleman who provided them, did not actually rip the data from the game, but instead recorded them into a MIDI device and then dumped them. The internal timing on that set is so out of whack, that back then you couldn't edit them easily. Also, notice on my recording, there's a skip at the beginning of the song and towards the end. The entirety of that particularl "ripped" set was like that, with each of the songs skipping all over the place. With over 50 something songs in that midi set, I can't see anyone back then going through the trouble of separating the drum tracks, to run different soundfonts, the way I was able to easily do in Fruity Loops a few hours ago.

What about the Chaos soundfonts? There is an 8MB. I used the 12MB one back int he day.

Almost! I actually have both the 8 and the 12. They sound really good, but the only similarity I found was the kicks. I'm thinking there's got to be a mixed set somewhere.

I have one called "103.5mg Real Font V2.1" (which I love for its Jazz kit), which from what I can tell is vastly EMU sounds, with drums from a different source. I'm wondering if whatever I'm hearing is a similar deal to that.