Topic: Dawn of War soundtrack(s)

[sirean_syan]

So, over the past month or so I've been busier than I care to be and just about the only game I've managed to somewhat play is more of Dawn of War. About a week ago I cracked and decided I needed to hear the game whenever I wanted and looked into getting the soundtrack ripped. After some searching, I found my answer.

Said answer.

I had done a similiar process with Homeworld 2. Relic has been using a similiar method of compression for game files and then for their in game music since the original Homeworld. Thankfully, fans have always been there with ways to pull all the elements out, mostly for modding purposes. This method works for the original game and all the expansions. The trick is just finding the files, which isn't so bad really.

So yeah, you can think of this as a Christmas gift for those of you who love the game. DoW has an awesome soundtrack and it's cool to be able to pull out some gems, like this guy, which is probably one of the coolest title screen themes out there(save-as).

One of the more interesting things you might see is that a lot of the music from the expansions have broken up tracks along with a centralized main piece. That's not segmented, but broken up by musical groups. So, you'll have a whole song file, but then two to four copies of the same song but just the brass, percussion, or strings. The breakups don't seem very strict in terms of being only one type of intrustment, but they generally stick to their groups. They do come out as slightly different takes on the music though, which is very cool. I can't imagine why they did this. I've never noticed it in the game and, like I said, there is a file with the whole thing together. Maybe I just never noticed when the game went to just drums or something. Either way, it's like a cool bonus for doing the work of getting the music out.

[Quemaqua]

D's not the only guy who can resurrect obscure threads.

So Sy, I'm still confused as to how the expansion music was done.  Is there a file that's got all the pieces together so you get the full music from a song, or is there *only* the one that has the different parts all split up?  Because that would be disappointing.

I wanted to do this tonight, but I don't think I'm going to have time.  I imagine it's going to take forever.

[sirean_syan]

For a good chunk of the music, there were two to four files for each song. One was always the full music so you had a nice file that you could just listen to without somehow putting everything together. Others were just the percussion, string, or brass elements of a song (sometimes mixtures of the elements.

Here's an example.

This one of the Chaos themes.
Here is the percussion file.

I did no work to these other than convert them to MP3's from Relic's propriety music file. This piece had two other files, one for percussion and bass and another for percussion and strings. Other pieces don't follow the same pattern. It's just all strange and only really seems to take up space. I'd be curious to learn if there was a reason for doing this.

[MysterD]

D's not the only guy who can resurrect obscure threads.

Woohoo! Let's make this trend really infectious!