Quaddicted.com Forum

houston

Member

Methods of Destruction - FLACs found

I've been meaning to release it into the wild for the two months half a year I've had it on my hands, but I've been unable to find anyone to do some spectral analysis and verify its authenticity. (So basically, I'm still not sure whether it's legit. Would be great if some of you guys might know how to figure that out.)
Here is a lossless release of "Methods of Destruction". Sonic Mayhem's 1996 debut album and alternative fan soundtrack to Quake, its musical portfolio would contribute to their collaboration with id Software to conceive Quake II's soundtrack and part of Quake III's soundtrack.

This album was popularly considered lost until 2012, when a choppy MP3 release of it appeared on a Steam thread. After Sascha Dikiciyan of Sonic Mayhem expressed his wishes to keep his earliest work away from peoples' ears (I really can't understand why. I think the stuff is great except for maybe the opening track), the uploader quickly deleted it. However this release would proliferate itself across the internet causing Sascha to eventually throw in the towel and begrudgingly give Kevin Sartori his blessing to release a cleaned-up distribution of that MP3 release.
A bit over a month has passed since Quake II Remastered was released, and I haven't heard any whispers of an official re-release of this album, so personally I can confidently consider it disowned abandonware.

Here's some additional links which can clarify the background of this album and its abandonment/availability status:
https://searx.tiekoetter.com/search?q=site:quaddicted.com+"methods+of+destruction"
The Quaddicted wiki article
The Steam thread
An archive of Kevin Sartori's article and release on his rare music blog
Parts of these articles refer to the album having been made available in 2012, this is in regards to the inferior MP3 release.

The old official track listing calls the first track "Data Track" for title consistency with the equivalent track on the Quake II disc, but if my release is legit, this data doesn't exist. It's just a 30-second loop of silence, just like what you'd hear on some custom Quake maps when they load "Track 1". I can't say I'm not a tiny bit disappointed by that, but it makes sense. There's plenty of CD players out there which don't know they're meant to skip this data, so sneaking a little text file or something into there isn't worth potentially compromising the listening experience for those buyers.

Last edited by houston (2023-09-30 11:43:04)

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Methods of Destruction - FLACs found

Whoa, thank you so much!

I looked at the spectrogram of B7 (with https://www.sonicvisualiser.org) and it looks legit. However with the modern AI craze, I bet there are tools that will take an MP3, hallucinate away compression artifacts etc and look like a lossless original. 5 years ago things were more sane. Is there anything you can share safely and without issues about the provenience of this rip?

houston

Member

Re: Methods of Destruction - FLACs found

Hey, I'll shoot you an email with some extra details. I asked whether they were okay with being credited a while back ("Would you mind if you were credited"...), and they had this to say:

"It's yours now, so feel free to share it any way you'd like!  I certainly don't need credit, but thanks!"

To me it definitely seems like they'd be fine with it, but I can be a little thick sometimes so I thought I should play it on the safe side. I can and probably ought to message them again for clarification but it'd feel a tiny bit awkward.

houston

Member

Re: Methods of Destruction - FLACs found

Just want to check, you received my message right? I thought it was as good a time as any to figure out how GPG signing works. Looking at how it appeared in my "sent" folder, I'm not seeing anything which should prevent reading it

Spirit

Administrator

Re: Methods of Destruction - FLACs found

Received! But I usually take a while to respond, there are many interesting things in life ;)