Portal Soundtrack Order (and other OB games if you are so inclined)

june gloom on 27/7/2008 at 02:11

So I'm putting together version 2 of a rather large fan-made soundtrack "box set" of music from the Valve games and a few mods such as Poke646 and Minerva. I finished version 1 last year, but this year I'm using my big playthrough of the entire series that I only ever do every couple years to determine the order in which each song plays in-game, and while it was easy to do it in the Goldsrc games because it's a ten-year-old game and alt-tabbing/reloading a lot is a breeze, it's less so in the Source engine. So I'm enlisting TTLG to help. I know there's a few Portal nerds out there who might actually pay attention to the music besides "Still Alive" so maybe you can help me. The same goes for HL2 and the Episodes, as well.

Zerker on 27/7/2008 at 12:25

You're probably aware of this, but the Steam version of Audiosurf also comes with the audio for all the games in the Orange Box (+HL1). Half-Life 1 & 2 have totally useless names like Song 01, Song 23, etc., but Portal, TF2 and the Episodes actually have proper names (and TF2 & Portal have track numbers too). I did a PDF listing of those songs and (http://www.zerker.ca/misc/ValveSongs.pdf) uploaded it to my web site. Hopefully the combination of track numbers (where available) and track times will help ID things from the original audio. Note that I changed the title of Portal's track 10 slightly; the use of "your" bothered the hell out of me, even if it may have been intentional. I can include the HL1 & 2 listings if you want them for some reason or another, like confirming that the internal song2 is the same as the song2 in the Audiosurf release.

I'm also really rather annoyed at the lack of names for HL1 & 2, so if you have names for those lined up, I'd love to start improving my audio tags. I should also really try and fix up the artist field and get the real artist in there... stupid default tag of "Valve".

EDIT: Found (http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=91802) this thread on the halflife2.net forums which has a listing of the proper names for Half-Life 1 & 2. That should do you, but if you want me to redo my PDF listing after I fix my titles, let me know.

EDIT EDIT: More info (track listings and stuff) at this (http://www.answers.com/topic/kelly-bailey-composer) Answers.com version of a Wikipedia article on Kelly Bailey, the composer for most of the Half-Life games. Oddly enough, the original article is gone from Wikipedia itself.

june gloom on 27/7/2008 at 18:04

Thanks, but most of that I already knew (otherwise I wouldn't have been able to make version 1, now would I? ;) ) Pretty much everything can be extracted from the GCFs, though my soundtracks for HL1, Opposing Force and Gunman Chronicles are straight from their old legacy CDs and therefore are in higher quality. The Half-Life 2 soundtrack was put together by extracting the music from the GCFs and comparing the track names in the list you provided with the track lengths.

What I'm looking for, and I guess I wasn't clear, was the order in which the songs play in-game. To that end, I've really been dreading doing the HL2 soundtrack because aside from the reused HL1 music it has a full 38 songs. Granted, two of them were not used in-game ("Headhumper" and "Combine Harvester") but it still beats out all the other games with the exception of Counterstrike: Condition Zero Deleted Scenes. (That one has a whopping 89 tracks, though sorting it out was easier because A) it's on Goldsrc and 2) the mp3s were loosely labelled according to their specific mission. I'm just glad I don't have to do that again.)

But a thread I found last night is going to save me a LOT of trouble. (http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=86938) This particular thread lists ALL the songs in HL2 in the order in which they play. Granted, he uses his own titles alongside the original filenames, but that's easily overcome: all I have to do is re-extract the music from the GCF with the original, simple filenames and compare to the files I have now, and use that list of his as a guide to the order.

The Episodes are going to be a bit easier as both of them only have about 8 tracks each and since most of them are very memorable (unlike Portal's soundtrack where some of the songs occasionally sound alike- it's not Kelly Bailey's best work by far) it's easy to place them.

Thanks for that Answers.com link, though. It irritates me that the deletionists got rid of Bailey's wiki page. Especially when a lot of the HL1 soundtrack stuff was written by me- I'm the one who dug up the original names for the HL1 tracks before they were retitled for HL2 and put those original names in.

If you or anyone else is interested in the soundtrack collection- either version 1, available now, or version 2 which I'm hoping to have done in the next couple months (Christmas at the latest), PM me.

Volitions Advocate on 27/7/2008 at 19:16

I'd be interested, but I"ll pm you later.
What I'm interested in at the moment is gunman chronicles. That was my favorite goldsrc retail game. But i only ever had an illegal copy of it which was corrupted so I couldn't finish the game.

I always saw it at radio shack in the bargain bin but it was attached to swat 2 or something like that and I didn't want to buy the other game. Now i wish i had because I can't find it anywhere.

Where's agood place to look for a legit copy of it?

june gloom on 27/7/2008 at 21:31

Try Amazon.

As for Gunman Chronicles I'm still trying to find track names; failing that I'm going to have to make up my own (kind of had to do that for CZ), and that involves going through the entire game again. I didn't include it in version 1 because I couldn't find the disc, but when I cleaned my room a couple months ago I found it in a drawer.

EvaUnit02 on 27/7/2008 at 23:38

Why isn't Gunman Chronicles on Steam anyway? They couldn't secure the rights when they parted ways with Sierra?

june gloom on 28/7/2008 at 01:04

I think Valve just didn't care. It sold very poorly (even worse than Condition Zero) and neither Sierra nor Valve gave it any support, or even a patch.