Trying to get music to work in Quake 2. CD music is enabled in menu but doesn't work. I tried making making a cd image of files and mounting that but that didn't work. I was using a cd version with the latest patch that made it cd free then made image of cd and mounted that to get music back without any problems but can't get music with the GOG. This is the complete list of console commands, console variables, and command line parameters for Quake 2. All console commands and variables are identified, documented, tagged, and classified. This document has been designed to help out all those people who want to customize the game to their liking. Info - Display the number of music.
I'm putting this generic update on all my Quake guides here on Steam, just as an FYI:I haven't maintained these guides in a while. Family stuff, etc., you know how it goes. Not a lot of game time, and what I do have goes into things other than guide-writing these days.Since Quake is a classic game, a lot of the stuff in these guides doesn't need to change.
Modern 'Quake engines' like Quakespasm, Mark V, FTE, and ezQuake are still being developed though, and so the features and behaviors of the newest versions of these engines may be somewhat different than what these guides describe now.I had some posted on the forum a while back, which might be interesting, although that's getting stale now too.A more up-to-date thing that might be useful/helpful for some of you is the neogeographica.com. That's a more focussed set of tools/docs that doesn't try to cover Every Quake Thing; it's just about getting a good modern singleplayer setup going as fast as possible.
So I can more easily poke at it occasionally to keep it up-to-date.In any case, thanks for the comments and other feedback over the years. Sorry I'm not engaging with it these days, but that's life. Maybe someday I'll have the time and motivation to rewrite this stuff, but in the meantime there's plenty of other good resources out there. Happy Quaking! As originally released, Quake played its soundtrack music using CD audio. Each track was actually a track on the CD itself (starting with track 2; track 1 contained the game data). The soundtrack music was never installed to your hard drive as a file.The problem with that now is that if you get Quake through digital distribution, you don't get a CD.
So no music.Of course, if you have an original Quake CD from back in the day, and it's still readable, then you might be good to go. Or you might not be - the original Quake engines, and some (or all?) modern Quake engines, will not properly loop the music tracks when used in versions of Windows after Windows XP.
And there are plenty of other reasons you might not want to mess with a physical CD anyway.Fortunately there are several ways to manage without a physical CD and still hear the good old creepy Quake music while you play. For any of the solutions in this guide, you first have to get a set of music files that make up the Quake soundtrack: one file for every music track on the original CD. There are various places you can get these, but I recommend this set that I generated:. www.eclecticmenagerie.com ( www.quaddicted.com). www.eclecticmenagerie.com ( www.quaddicted.com).
www.eclecticmenagerie.com ( www.quaddicted.com)(Obviously, you only need the mission pack soundtracks if you have the mission packs.)If you are using one of the modern 'Quake engines' (programs for playing Quake) mentioned in this guide below as supporting soundtrack files, then all you need to do is follow the easy instructions included in each of the above download archives. Basically you'll just need to move a 'music' folder to the correct location within your Quake installation.If on the other hand you're determined to use the original Quake programs, there are solutions described below for them as well, but it won't be quite so easy.You can find Quake soundtrack files at other spots around the web too. The reasons that I decided to make yet another package of soundtrack files are: other soundtrack files probably have not removed the CD pre-emphasis (none that I've tested have done this), and they may not work with your Quake engine of choice unless you rename, relocate, and/or reformat the files. Using the packages linked above will avoid all of those problems.The music on the Quake CD has 'pre-emphasis'. What does that mean?The hydrogenaudio wiki has a wiki.hydrogenaudio.org that is worth a look if you want details.
The upshot though is this: to make the playback sound correct, ripped files need to be processed with a specific equalization curve to get rid of the pre-emphasis. This matches what your CD player did when playing the physical CD.Ripping a CD with iTunes will handle such 'de-emphasis' automatically. The hydrogenaudio wiki page has some tips about other ripping methods, and Google will also turn up good discussion about this.The difference between Quake tracks that have been properly de-emphasized and those that haven't is fairly subtle to hear. But a spectral analysis (showing the volume at different frequencies) can make what's going on a little clearer. Here's an example comparing the first Quake track not de-emphasized (top) vs. Correctly de-emphasized (bottom):Without de-emphasis, the higher frequencies will be too loud.If you are using soundtrack files that you downloaded from somewhere else, and you don't know whether or not they have been correctly de-emphasized.
Well, they probably haven't been, but you might not want to lose sleep over it. Just something to keep in mind. If you want to test it, you can get the free spek.cc tool, use it to open up your track02.ogg or track02.mp3 file, and compare the image you get to the images above.If you would rather rip the tracks yourself, you'll need to start with a physical Quake CD or CD image. ( provides download links for soundtrack CD images.) You can use virtual CD software like www.slysoft.com to 'mount' the CD image so that applications see it as a real CD.
Once you've ripped the CD, you'll need to make sure that the ripped tracks are encoded to the right format, named correctly, and put in the correct location. This guide won't go into any details about the ripping process, but the sections below describe the necessary file format/naming/placing.Note that Quake will play CD audio from a mounted CD image just like it would from the real Quake CD, so that's one way to hear the soundtrack.
But it's a bit of a hassle to mount an image whenever you want to play, and that approach suffers from the same tracks-not-looping problem as real CDs. So let's not do that! Engines that only support CD audioThe original Quake engines (the ones provided by Steam) only support CD audio. If you want to get them to play music files, you will have to modify them. I haven't tried this myself, but Dragonsbrethren has posted a guide:Most modern Quake engines also still support CD audio, so there is a good chance that this modification would also work on them. But if an engine can manage one of the other solutions below, it would probably be better to use that other solution.
Engines that play soundtrack music filesSome Quake engines can play music files to give you a soundtrack during the game. Among the choices listed in the 'Quake Engines' guide, soundtrack file playback is supported by icculus.org, quakespasm.sourceforge.net, celephais.net, www.quaddicted.com, super8.qbism.com, fte.triptohell.info, www.quaddicted.com, and www.quakeforge.net.For soundtrack file playback to work, a few things have to be considered:.
whether the music files are 'loose files', or inside pak/pk3 archives. where the files are placed.
what the files are named. what audio format the files are inDifferent Quake engines support different answers for those questions. However the first three questions have a common set of answers that will work for all engines mentioned above.If you already have a setup that works for the engine you're currently using, I'm not saying you should change it. This is just a description of a common arrangement that works for multiple engines:. The music files are loose files, NOT inside a pak or pk3 archive.
The files are placed inside a 'music' subfolder of the 'id1' folder. For missionpack or mod soundtracks, the files are placed in a 'music' subfolder of the appropriate game folder. So the original Quake soundtrack files go inside 'id1music', Mission Pack 1 soundtrack files go inside 'hipnoticmusic', and Mission Pack 2 soundtrack files go inside 'roguemusic'. The files are named in the pattern 'track nn', where ' nn' is the CD track number that the file was ripped from. Since the soundtrack starts at the second CD track, MP3 soundtrack files are named 'track02.mp3', 'track03.mp3', etc. OGG soundtrack files are named 'track02.ogg', 'track03.ogg', etc.As for the audio format: most of the distributions of the Quake soundtrack are in OGG format, and OGG files can be played by most of these Quake engines. If you have both OGG and MP3 files then you are covered for sure.
Specifically, the Quake engines discussed here support the following formats:. DarkPlaces: OGG, WAV. QuakeSpasm: OGG, MP3, WAV. Fitzquake Mark V: MP3. DirectQ: OGG, MP3, WMA, WAV.
Quake 2 Music Ogg
qbism Super8: OGG, MP3. FTE: OGG, MP3, WAV.
reQuiem: MP3. QuakeForge: OGGSome quirks to be aware of:. For OGG support in DirectQ, you must install the xiph.org. You may have to reboot after installing that filter. The Linux version of QuakeSpasm requires external libraries: libogg or libvorbis for OGG support, and libmad or libmpg123 for MP3. I'm not sure if DarkPlaces' OGG support on Linux has the same requirement, but I suspect it does. QuakeForge needs a 'tracklist.cfg' file that tells it where to find the music tracks.
If you downloaded a soundtrack package linked at the top of this guide, then you'll get a tracklist.cfg and instructions on where to put it. Otherwise, see the QuakeForge documentation.Quake soundtrack files that you get from somewhere else may end up in the 'soundcdtracks' subfolder instead of the 'music' subfolder. This is a location that DarkPlaces will look for soundtrack files, but most other Quake engines will not look there. You can move the files to the 'music' subfolder to make them accessible to all Quake engines (including DarkPlaces).Soundtrack files are also sometimes distributed inside a pk3 file. This works with some engines, but not with others. A pk3 file is just a zip archive, so if you want, you can open it up with any unzip utility, extract the tracks, and put the extracted tracks in the appropriate 'music' subfolder. First a bit of history:The Quake sound effects come from WAV files with a sample rate of 11025 Hz, and that was the quality/rate at which they were played.
However some sound cards at the time were picky about the sample rate that they would accept, and so the original Quake engines introduced a command-line option ('-sspeed' and then later '-sndspeed') that could be used to change the output rate for the sound effects.Setting '-sndspeed 44100' for example - to represent a 44100 Hz output sample rate - might have been necessary to get some sound card to work, but it did not actually improve the quality of the sounds. It did change the tone of the sounds, as a result of the upsampling, making effects sound 'brighter'.
Although this changed the character of the original sounds, some players preferred or at least got accustomed to a higher sndspeed setting.Command-line options can be passed to a Quake engine executable by various methods. See the 'Command Line' section of this guide:The soundtrack music is of higher quality than the sound effects: 'CD quality', 44100 Hz. In the original Quake, the soundtrack music was played back through a separate system than the sound effects, and the '-sndspeed' command-line option did not affect the music.When Quake engines first added support for playing soundtrack music files, the '-sndspeed' option did affect that music playback, at least in some cases. If you preferred the original character of the Quake sound effects, that could mean that you were stuck with muffled/fuzzy-sounding music.
Fortunately, you don't have to make that choice these days; if you're using the latest version of one of the engines described here, the music playback should again be handled independently of the sound effect sample rate. (Particularly, if you're using the QuakeSpasm engine, make sure that you're at version 0.85.10 or later.)So you should always have CD-quality soundtrack music playback now. If you were previously using the '-sndspeed' option just to improve the music, you should reconsider that.As for the sound effects, here's a summary of how sndspeed settings behave for each of these engines.
DarkPlaces defaults to a sndspeed of 48000, but it plays sound effects similarly to the original Quake; they don't sound brighter to my ears. I would guess that its sndspeed value is the sample rate for its final mix, but I can't actually detect any change to the sound effects or music if I specify different sndspeed values. QuakeSpasm defaults to a sndspeed of 11025. Convert apfs to hfs. At that sndspeed, it also provides a new console variable 'sndfilterquality' that more exactly controls how the sound effects are played; see its README for more details. If you prefer the brighter sound effects, you can use '-sndspeed 44100'.
Fitzquake Mark V and DirectQ default to a sndspeed of 11025. If you prefer the brighter sound effects, you can use '-sndspeed 44100'. qbism Super8, like DarkPlaces, defaults to a sndspeed of 48000. Also like DarkPlaces, I don't hear a difference when using different sndspeed values. Unlike DarkPlaces, the sound effects in qbism Super8 have the brighter, upsampled tone.
I haven't tested this for FTE, reQuiem, or QuakeForge.Most of these engines also provide a console variable for the sndspeed setting, either named 'sndspeed' or 'sndspeed', which may or may not be saved to the config file; check the engine's README or other docs.