Alexander Seropian – Marathon (1994) OST (QuickTime 2.0 & 2.5 mixes with stereo separation)

Headphones strongly recommended for this one – get a pair with nice bass.

I made a stereo mix of two different versions of the soundtrack for Bungie’s 1994 video game Marathon: one using the QuickTime 2.0 instruments from when the game shipped, and the other using the relatively similar QuickTime 2.5 instruments from when I first played it. (The original soundtrack was entirely mono and was just made up of QuickTime’s rough MIDI equivalent, so how it sounded depended upon which version of the QuickTime Musical Instruments you used.)

I figured this would be a gimmick that I’d only listen to a few times, but it actually turned out surprisingly listenable, so I’m uploading it to YouTube. Although the drums are the most obvious difference between the two (not only do 2.0 and 2.5 have different drum samples, but the drums are much louder in 2.5), the stereo separation makes it obvious that there’s a significant difference in frequency balance as well (on the whole, 2.0 has more bass and 2.5 has more treble).

I took some artistic liberties when mixing this. The two versions often varied significantly in loudness from track to track; I adjusted both to -20 dB RMS for each song. I also cleaned up occasional transfer noise and fixed subsonic rumble that might affect how the songs compressed (but is probably inaudible when uncompressed, since it’s subsonic). My process for fixing subsonic rumble included phase rotation, then normalisation, which further increased the dynamic range and resulted in the levels ultimately being -21.56 dB RMS.

In case you don’t speak audio engineer, the result is that this mix is quieter than most modern music, but also has far better dynamic range – adjust your volume accordingly.

Note that these recordings don’t align 100% with one another, but they’re only about 5 milliseconds off from each other at worst, so it’s rarely noticeable (“Flowers in Heaven” is one exception). I aligned them as closely as I could without stretching the audio. There’s also some oddness with the panning in “Guardians” due to a discrepancy between the original recordings (found at http://marathon.bungie.org/story/musi.... I have no explanation for the cause.

I’ve uploaded a lossless FLAC version of this mix here: https://dropbox.com/sh/2ph95u9cvid5c5.... To use these in Aleph One, convert them to Ogg Vorbis or MP3, then rename them to 00.ogg (or 00.mp3), 01.ogg (or 01.mp3), and so on, through 15.ogg (or 15.mp3).

I make no claim to owning this material; Bungie released the Marathon trilogy as freeware in 2005, but this soundtrack is presumably still © & ℗ 1994 Bungie and/or Alexander Seropian.

For those curious, I mixed this in iZotope RX 5 Advanced.

Here’s a list of each track, its start point in the video, and then the levels that use it.

0:00 Aliens Again
#06 The Rose
#18 No Artificial Colors
#30 5-D Space

2:11 Chomber
#07 Smells Like Napalm, Tastes Like Chicken!
#35 Waldo World Arena

4:42 Fat Man
#03 Never Burn Money
#36 What Goes Up, Must Come Down

6:14 Flippant
#04 Defend This
#16 Neither High Nor Low
#32 E Equals MC WHAT!!

7:36 Flowers in Heaven
#08 Cool Fusion
#37 You Don’t Need to See My I.D.

10:20 Freedom
#12 Shake Before Using…
#31 Arena

12:29 Guardians
#10 Blaspheme Quarantine

14:09 Landing
#01 Arrival
#09 G4 Sunbathing
#26 Try Again
#28 Mars Needs Women

17:26 Leela
#02 Bigger Guns Nearby
#13 Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!
#21 Beware of Low-Flying Defense Drones…
#34 Spiral Insanity

21:00 New Pacific
#17 Pfhor Your Eyes Only…
#24 Ain’t Got Time Pfhor This…

22:40 New Pacific (reprise)
#19 Unpfhorgiven
#23 Pfhoraphobia

25:48 Rapture
#20 Two Times Two Equals…
#22 Eupfhoria

27:37 Rushing
#15 Habe quiddam
#29 Carnage Palace Deeee-Luxe

29:39 Splash (Marathon)
#27 Ingue ferroque

35:29 Swirls
#05 Couch Fishing
#14 Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap
#25 Welcome to the Revolution…
#33 Showered with Grenades

38:02 What About Bob?
#11 Bob-B-Q

Here’s a spectrogram of the whole recording: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachment... 2.0 is left channel (top), 2.5 is right channel (bottom). Frequency distributions are from 0 Hz to 22,050 Hz; brighter areas have more of that frequency at that point.

And the waveforms: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachment... The channels might look imbalanced on several tracks, but that's because so much of the 2.5 mix is the drums. Notice that the tracks with drums are much quieter in the right channel when the drums drop out. (Hard to tell with “Splash (Marathon)” since there’s only one brief segment at the start without drums, though, and the drums in “Freedom” never drop out at all.)

And here’s a zoomed-in waveform of “Splash” to show how drum-heavy 2.5 is compared to 2.0: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachment...