Hi gang! This will probably not come as much of a surprise but Minecraft is a pretty big and serious hobby of mine. I love this game and the extremes it can bring us (at one time I'm trying to figure out EMC's shop signs, then getting my fingers behind command blocks and all of sudden that's followed up by parsing JSON structured files). But what some of you guys might not have known so far: audio, and audio processing, is a true passion of mine. I work within this field. (not full time) , I actually managed to earn money within this field (with -returning- customers, the returning part is the most important one here!) and yeah.. audio stuff... it is awesome. SO... This week a friend of mine contacted me and he told me a story about how his kid discovered a hidden secret with the 11 record. Obviously through Youtube and other sources, but he said that there were hidden messages in the 11 records audio. He knows about my drive for audio so the logical question came up: could you look into this? Sure thing, but.. the first problem arose: where to find this audio? I knew there were OGG files within your games folder in the days of 1.7, but not anymore. But the 'Indexes' folder gave all that away. From: \Users\Peter\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\assets\indexes\1.11.json: Code: "minecraft/sounds/records/ward.ogg": { "hash": "f685021d4f26d6b590bffb341908e25e92e18cef", "size": 1987588 }, This means that the file I'm looking for is called f685021d4f26d6b590bffb341908e25e92e18cef and it'll reside in the .minecraft\assets\objects\f6 folder. Go look. Better yet: it's merely a renamed item. What I did was copy it to my working directory, rename it into "xxx.ogg" and done. Trust me: players like VLC will agree. Of course I took this one step further: This is me in my element... What you're seeing here is Ableton Live, my de-facto favorite Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). The Suite version, about the best you can get. Audio and me... I get carried away. Ward is one of my favorite Minecraft records, so obviously you don't seriously expect me to just play it and do nothing? Here I started boosting things a little bit but that was just appetizer. Ward has a very specific ring to it; the second segment starts 'dark' with a nice bass and all. It's also my favorite part of the song. Surely I can boost it up a little? Guess what, I can. Not just that, enough to have my neighbors tap my window 8 band equalizer plus multi-band compressor = neighbors tapping your window No, this is not as serious as it may seem. I have a clear understanding with my next door neighbor, it is the honest thing to do if audio is your main drive. What you see directly above is Ward's bass driving straight through the walls (of course it didn't help that I had turned on my sub-woofer). Here's a noodle for yah: I didn't raise the volume of my speakers nor did I heavily increase Live's output. Technically the audio output level was no different from me playing Minecraft, and I sometimes do that deep in the night. The main difference might be my subwoofer, but I have that set to 30% or something to avoid issues (when I have my heavy metal / hardrock moments). So what made my neighbor tap on my window this morning (this honestly happened) yet when I jammed Black Sabbath (hardrock band, known for their stomping basses) nothing happened? Frequencies. Have you ever seen a movie and then the commercials started and it seemed as if they blasted out while you didn't increase the volume at all? That is done through mastering, pushing certain frequencies more forward than others so that they stand out. Yeah, and when I'm in a mood like this I like to do that with certain low/mid -ranged frequencies as well. The result is a sound which can easily pierce through the walls Which is exactly why I have an understanding with my direct next door neighbor: "When you think I overdo it, please tap my window". 11.ogg conspiracies I finally get to use the expression legitimately What you see here is the M4lscope, it's a Max for Live device designed by yours truly. Max for Live is a visual programming language within Live which allows you to just about set up anything. Just for reference: here is the offical download page on maxforlive.com and as you can see it's been downloaded 977 times already. Now, the weird stuff was said to be at the end, so I set up a loop: And then used the sonograph option on my patch. Apparently there is a screenshot out there which shows you the same output, yet colored so it emphasizes on the head. Yah, I call that fake data. So here's the real deal, courtesy of my own M4lscope (sorry, I take pride in that project): It seems some players see something like this: = = = It starts right after the yellow/red area in the middle. But I seriously wouldn't call that a face at all. I think some playera have way too much imagination. BUT.. what do you think?
Haha! Some people just like to pretend hidden meanings into everything nowadays... Ableton Live seems really cool, and I know it's great. But it's not very cheap, so I don't think I'll be able to get it anytime soon. Might take me at least 3-8 years to finish studying (got to start first ) and get a well-paid job. I suppose I could download the trial and play around with it some time, though!
Yeah, and that's only one part of it, apparently there are also supposed to be numbers hidden in there. I think I can make out a 2 of some sort, but only because I've seen the original 'evidence' in the mean time. I've been playing with some of the other songs and well, I can come up with much weirder examples. 13 for instance, if you play that you'll be greeted with some very specific sine waves indicating a rather plain and 'direct' sound. An ideal starting ground to play with, but... Yah, you're not allowed to use their stuff, otherwise I might even be tempted to create some kind of "Minecraft music remix" True, most of this stuff isn't very cheap. Although we're getting into the holiday season which is almost always a good time to do some shopping. Most companies provide some serious discounts on their products around this time of year, it's one of those many traditions Fun fact: it was for that reason why I bought most of my initial stuff also around this period. It's actually one of the man tips I included in one of my many tutorials Anyway, there are also dozens of outstanding freeware environments availabe, Reaper coming straight to mind. If you combine Reaper with the ReaPlugs and then also check out the excellent Tal freeware VST's (VST's are plugins which you can use in most major DAW's) then you got yourself a very solid base environment, and fully free of charge! And don't forget AMVST either, I'm a big fan of their Analog Warfare myself as well. Oh, and if you are grabbing this then don't forget Asio4all. Optionally you can expand with Wavosaurus (freeware wave editor, with ASIO & VST support) and maybe Pure Data if you feel technical / programming-like and then you got yourself one heck of a starting setup, completely free of charge. The TAL effects & instruments especially are really well made in my opinion and provide tons of options. lol, pointing you there just made me spot a few new things myself Definitely going to check out wavedraw & kicklab on that last VST page But yeah, that's the fun part in my opinion: it doesn't have to cost too much money to set up a decent starting ground. Of course... You do get what you pay for Although there is no doubt in my mind what so ever that the setup I described here can be used to make some very solid music (or other stuff) there obviously are some differences to deal with. But that's a discussion maybe best reserved for another thread (lol, almost forgot I started that)
