Novastorm PC Game Rip
I never played Novastorm. I’ve been familiar with some of it’s music for years though, via the French magazine game music CD I posted a while back. Having re-listened to it recently, I decided to finally seek the complete soundtrack for it, convinced from the quality that I would find a CD-DA redbook easily. Mistake ! Turns out the game’s audio is embedded into some complex compression system and that there’s no way to easily rip or even record it ! Player One Magazine must have received master tracks from Psygnosis themselves when they made that CD in 1994.
Anyway, searching around on the web, you soon notice that this soundtrack left a strong impression on those who played it. Youtube gameplay videos are full of music requests and lamentations over the lack of an official soundtrack. Among these, I noticed a person called Bobske who was claiming he actually recorded the game audio and could send it to anyone wanting it. And he did ! This is his work I am sharing here.
Sadly, I soon noticed the recording contained many skips and clicks. When I asked him about it, here was his answer:
“Yeah, that’s the problem with running old games on new hardware. Had to use DOSBOX to run the game. It works, but it isn’t perfect. The game had some slight delays and little distortions. I edited out most of the audible distortions but unfortunately, I couldn’t fix them all.”
So that’s it ! This version is pretty much the best it can get, unless someone goes through the trouble of running the game on an old ’94 PC, or the master tracks are finally released by Psygnosis and Rik Ede, the composer.
Anyway, great music. Techno-ish sci-fi atmospheres, both epic and hypnotic, quite typical of the old European game music scene. Level 4 Stage 1 remains one of my favourites. Really too bad they didn’t choose CD-DA support !
Many thanks again to Bobske, and enjoy the music ~
!!! edit: Dricks has since then completed a high quality game rip ! Get it >> here <<
May 18th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Thanks for hosting the soundtrack!
You’re awesome :)
May 18th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
haha no thanks to you ! <3
May 19th, 2009 at 11:15 am
A-ah, thanks for this! :) I remember that days when I played Novastorm! :)
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:13 am
Thank you so much for providing us with this awesome piece of soundtrack music, niki and Bobske!
I’ve long searched for this and you made me very happy.
August 8th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Back then, I loved that game.
I still have the CDRom, and stil works.
So i did multiple sound extraction to replace bad tempo scratches with good part.
Here is the Boss 1 music in 48khz FLAC without any scratches.
I’ll try to do some other tracks when i’ve time, as it requires a LOT of time to correctly remove scratches… ;)
Hope you enjoy
http://dl.free.fr/osDTFv2rU
August 8th, 2009 at 1:44 am
Since i can’t sleep tonight, here are Level 1 Stage 1 and Level 1 Stage 2 48khz FLAC scratchless musics ;)
Enjoy!
http://dl.free.fr/ojIDwZqeB
http://dl.free.fr/jvA1UmN0k
August 8th, 2009 at 7:54 am
Awesome !! :D
August 9th, 2009 at 5:34 am
I managed to find some time… ;D
Here is the Complete Level 1 UltraQuality edit, 48Khz, FLAC.
http://dl.free.fr/atndowCZJ
August 9th, 2009 at 10:22 am
ya know, in a way, the skips and stuttering gives it a more nostalgic feel. I remember playing this on a 486 box with a crappy semi-broken 4x cd-rom drive I salvaged from work, stuttering throughout the whole game every time the drive was re-seeking… Good work on the cleanup though. Looking forward to the entire album if you’re up to it.
August 11th, 2009 at 12:36 am
After more than 30 hours of work, here is the full Novastorm Soundtrack in very high quality.
There is still some room for improvements, but it requires too much time, and i’m too exhausted right now.
I’ll probably do some more cleaning later.
I uploaded 2 versions :
Ultra Quality : FLAC lossless 48khz (340MB)
Link : http://dl.free.fr/r3moAoCdT
High Quality : MP3 320kbps 48khz (130MB)
Link : http://dl.free.fr/qIpDjMRhk
Enjoy!
September 29th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Wonderful job ! I’ve long searched for this and you made me very happy. Many thanks for this !
September 30th, 2009 at 12:09 am
Thanks!
As promised, here is version 1.1 with even more cleaning on some songs…
FLAC (340MB) :
http://dl.free.fr/vnfhwOYXO
MP3 (130MB) :
http://dl.free.fr/l5OkeO0xp
September 30th, 2009 at 12:21 am
yay :D
September 30th, 2009 at 12:36 am
edit: Just noticed your other release post got filtered by the antispam script for some reason. Sorry about that and thanks so much again for your awesome work. I’ll see about hosting it here when I get s stable connection again, if you agree. :D
October 4th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Pas e soucis ;)
I mean, with pleasure :D
October 12th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Thanks ever so much for your hard work. I loved this game and used to play it for hours. Did anyone else find it easier on the hard level? There was more ships to shoot = more tokens = better weapons earlier on. My favourite of all the musci was the Level 4 sequence. many thanks for bring back all those memories! Daniel
October 17th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I absolutely agree, the game was a lot easier in hard mode because of all the money you got from those bunch of ennemies.
More over, starting with three lives, you end up with seven because of those points you get from extra enemies, rofl.
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:01 pm
I stopped here to thank Bobske again, 4 years ago you sent me the full set of tracks to my mail, still I’m so grateful to you, I’m a big fan of this game, I used to play it daily just to enjoy it is music!
Thanks to Bobske for his hard work, thanks to niki for hosting it, and thanks to Dricks for cleaning.
I hope Rik Ede will stop by someday to sell/give away this legendary soundtracks!
October 23rd, 2009 at 11:50 pm
There was a CD produced of the music. It was called “novastorm: the soundtrack” and I believe was used for promotional purposes.
They have been available for sale on ebay UK.
October 24th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
oho ! that would definitely be interested to hunt for info on this :O
October 28th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Thanks so much Dricks, you are the best, searched for this for years!!!
October 29th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Very thanks Drick! an excellent work!!!!
thanks so much!! :)
October 31st, 2009 at 2:29 am
Awesome! Been waiting for this… Quick question: When you were ripping the soundtrack, I assume you had to go in-game via dos-box while running an external recording program (creative recorder or something) kinda like what Bobske did right? Were you running the game via cd-rom or as a cd-image mounted with a program like daemontools? Maybe the skipping could be eliminated this way?
October 31st, 2009 at 8:01 am
The skips are not due to the CDROM (i made a copy of the CD files into a directory and mounted it into dosbox as a CDROM)
Back to the time where is was playing it on a 486, there already was skips.
Dosbox does a great job, everything is back, even the skips ;)
That’s a software problem. They used a very weird encoding mechanism to get synchronized with the video but it seems that it wasn’t perfect ;)
I have fixed all the skips using multirecording of the music and replacing bad chunks with good ones (see readme for infos)
The recording itself is very easy uing dosbox : press CTRL+F6 to activate it, and press CTRL+F6 to stop it.
November 4th, 2009 at 6:10 am
I’ve been looking for this track for awhile and only thought about the idea that the audio was part of the video files that ran in the background. You mentioned a weird encoding which makes sense — that was back at a time when the visual and audio quality of that game was cutting edge.
Anyway, to the point, I’d like to work on possibly building a decoder for the video files that the game used. I don’t know if anybody’s already started on this work or not but I’m willing to give it a try.
November 4th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
hehe, I love how all this is evolving. Anyway, to answer for myself, I sure don’t have the abilities for such a task. I say, go for it ! :D
November 10th, 2009 at 8:42 am
Thanks! Great job done actually.
Not sure if it worths to create the decoder for the game files – it is unlikely that music has better quality than it is played.
November 16th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
[…] Soooo I’m finally back with an internet and my first action will be to post Drick’s Novastorm high quality rip he posted in the comments of Bobske’s original release. […]
January 5th, 2010 at 4:22 am
OOHHHH, THANKS A MILLION!!!
in my opinion the best music EVER in a computer-game..
greetings from Holland,
Angelo
January 5th, 2010 at 11:42 pm
Thanks a LOT for this music, I was looking for it for a very long time, I loved this game.
I’ve made an animation using two of these musics, you may see it here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqkAt_s3HSE
Regards and thanks again !!!! :)
January 6th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
hehe nice anim. The music indeed fits perfectly :D
January 19th, 2010 at 10:59 pm
Hi!
Just stopped by to pick up the “new and improved” soundtrack :)
Awesome work Dricks!
PS: Does anybody know how to get a full power bar? After all these years I still don’t know how to get the last one :)
January 24th, 2010 at 9:22 pm
There lives so much nice composed music in computer games…
Dricks, thanks for your work, its the base for my personal soundtrack. To bad there is no complete original soundtrack on CD without these environment sounds, like the 2 tracks on “La Compil’ Player One” (btw. this “go get’m boys” interrupts the music on a bad way for me) with sweet 44,1khz in stereo!
March 1st, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Wow, marvelous work on this complex rip Dricks.
Finaly those classics 90’s dance style tunes are enjoyable out of the game. :)
March 14th, 2010 at 3:21 am
Hi, I’d like to thank Dricks for your hard work at assembling the soundtrack. However, there seems to be a problem with downloading it. There’s either an error which I assume is saying the file isn’t there anymore, or there’s no download link. Can anyone help me? Perhaps someone could kindly re-upload the FLAC soundtrack? Thank you so much for your help.
March 14th, 2010 at 11:26 am
the MP3 version is here:
http://raborak.com/saladedemais/novastorm-high-quality-game-rip
March 15th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
Thanks a lot for your help, niki!
Does anyone have the FLAC soundtrack as well?
April 1st, 2010 at 5:47 am
Great because I did exactly this and it was very painful to remove all the glitches. Then I regretfully lost all my work. Now thankfully there you are another person who has done it. Super.
April 9th, 2010 at 7:45 am
Thanks for your positive comments :D
For the FLAC version, here is version 1.2 of the pack :
http://dl.free.fr/di5iDGcvW
Enjoy!
April 10th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Thank you SO MUCH for this, I played this game when I was like 10 yo and even then I couldn’t get enough of the music! Now I can finally put it on my mp3 player and enjoy it! MANY THANKS, you’re my hero(es)!!
May 12th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
This is so awesome. I’ve been playing PC games since the late 80’s, and in my experience there are only a handful of games with such great music (Crusader: No Remorse comes to mind as well). I still have in my possession the original CD of this game, and play it every now and then (but only for the music!)
May 12th, 2010 at 11:46 pm
Sorry to post again, but I just remembered that Prince of Persia 2 had an amazing MIDI soundtrack. I’ll go look for that now :D
May 13th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
hehe, nice. Don’t hesitate submitting stuff here if you ever feel like it. =D
May 15th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Two other game’s musics i really liked back then :
Leemings
http://dl.free.fr/rM8Y7vMhS
OMF2097 :
http://dl.free.fr/bFupGXTFW
May 19th, 2010 at 8:34 pm
Two other game’s musics i really liked back then :
Leemings
dl.free.fr/rM8Y7vMhS
OMF2097 :
dl.free.fr/bFupGXTFW
May 19th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Thankies ~ =p
November 5th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
[…] http://raborak.com/saladedemais/novastorm-pc-game-rip/comment-page-1 […]
February 12th, 2011 at 2:48 am
just wanted to say thank you to dricks for the extra effort on cleaning up those tracks! your work is greatly appreciated!
March 3rd, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Many thanks for hosting this. As with many of the posters above, this is one of my favorite video game soundtracks. I have the original CD and could never quite figure out how to extract the audio myself.
March 20th, 2012 at 1:48 am
Just been thinking of music i liked again which of course brought me back here, is there any chance you could rip amiga music also? im after hollywood poker pro, the music is class and bring back many memories, lol. Any chance of a rip?