[M-Mu] Organizing the archived soundtrack for de Blob 1 & 2

I have a habit of grabbing important or significant chunks of music data in the moment, then reworking them later on to function as if it was a proper, official release of a game soundtrack. As I'm currently on hour 9 of tackling my music collection head-on to clean things up, I figured I'd just ramble here about my process to give my mind a break.



A long time ago, I was given a soft lead as to the whereabouts of where to find a soundtrack release of de Blob, a game I love that's quite dear to me, but also has really interesting musical elements, with the main soundtrack being modified / remixed based on the color you absorbed, and painted objects with. I was always curious how a soundtrack release of it would work because it seems like there were too many musical combinations to accurately portray the soundtrack.

Well, as luck would have it, someone beat me to the punch a long time ago, and contacted the composer directly, getting all musical assets, stems, promo music, etc into one big archive that I mindlessly grabbed (here's a link, but it's the internet, you know link rot's gonna happen), and didn't think about again until now. The structure of it was extremely loose, but seemed to be intended to act as it's own standalone release of the game soundtrack, with data paired alongside it. The kicker is, if you download it now, it's been changed. Know why ?



(By the way, this was not "found", a fan sent it to him and he forgot about it. Classy.)

You've got to be kidding me...right, so the music collection I have for this isn't even complete anymore, and I now have to cleanly merge two separate archives. Luckily, it seems like the only thing that's been added is the gamerip for the found DS port, and...



...a disc that has a few tracks for a Japanese ad of the game...huh. Well, this does raise an interesting question; With this new data, what should be lumped with the main tracks of the first and second game ? After a bit of deliberation (for the record, there's never a "correct" way to do any of this, it's something each person has to decide for themselves) I decided on simply keeping these under the side folder of Extras, as...

- The DS gamerip audio is...pretty crunchy and poor quality, as this was still development audio through the DS's output, it stands out in a bad way.
- The Japanese ad tracks, while slightly higher quality, don't feel like they fit in with the other tracks naturally, especially as there's other ad music within the Data folder.

With that decided, I decided on a layout like...



this. Cleaner looking, right ? While I've skimmed over quite a bit of file organization, I wanted to treat each soundtrack type as it's own "disc", with all data and extra goodies off to the side, as if it's the bonus content in some deluxe version. As for the individual tracks...



I really couldn't tell you why I'm like this. Hyphens always look nicer than periods to me, as hyphens separate data very cleanly, while periods make it feel like a sentence, or equation. I have brain problems, and I will obsessively change any albums, tracks, folders, anything to conform to this standard. This also applies to proper capitalization, even if something's in parentheses. Though speaking of data...



Dear god they didn't touch the tags at all. Okay, right, well, that's a lot to clean up manually. But, I've certainly dealt with worse (looking you, FFXIV OST collection, and needing to cross reference each artist's name and track title from Japanese to English).



My preferred way of dealing with these kind of things. Track title with proper capitalization, and "disc information" always put in there, even though technically we're not working with discs. Even if it's a single released from some artist, I'll still specify it's the first disc of a total of one. For the record, this system absolutely collapses when I'm not dealing with FLACs, but that's an entry about how I manage that for another day. Old habits die hard I suppose, but if everything follows the same rules of tagging, it would make any mass edits in the future a lot easier. Speaking of.



Some...140 tracks later, everything is cleaned up, categorized, capitalized, tagged, and I've lost another piece of my sanity. A detail worth noting, TRACKTOTAL has to be set to the total tracks for the disc, not the collection, something that tripped me up a long time ago. Though one thing tripping me up right now...



This brings up a situation I haven't encountered yet, of having Japanese tracks too obscure to have an official English translation that I can pull from ala FFXIV. For the first time, I'm a bit too uncomfortable trying to translate any of the kanji (?, hiragana ? katakana ? I don't know Japanese, yet it seems to keep inconveniencing me in any interest I take, stupid underground Tetris scene...) to something a bit more indexable like English, so it remains largely untouched, besides just cleaning up the tags.

Once the dust settles, and I do some more small tweaks to clean the whole collection up, it's just a little under 4GB, 8,855 files, subject to change if I change my mind on a few tiny things in the future. Quite a lot was skimmed over, but I wrote this very freeform while I did it, and a lot of this won't be interesting to anyone.

Join me next time when I break into the National Archives and replace periods on the Declaration of Independence with hyphens, then get caught and downsample the guard's legs to something lossy so they can't chase me, then make the news and save the article in my own archive.

(2023-5-22 Update: Fixed broken Imgur links, migrated to imgbb, and added [M-Mu] tag)