I Like Discovering New Music
A lot of music I like is weird obscure music I hear as background soundtracks in movies or videos games or other random stuff like that. Years ago, when I was in high school, I was playing flash games on the web late at night when I came across one called "Save the Dummy." It was a fun game, but the soundtrack to it was totally dope. I wanted to find the song, so I tried using Shazam, but it couldn't identify it. I tried Google searching "Save the Dummy soundtrack" or "music from Save the Dummy" and got absolutely nothing, not even a cheap or low quality recording of it. Disheartened, I settled for using the voice memo function on my phone to make a recording of my computer speakers playing the song. It works, of course, but the result is a fuzzy and very low quality version that's very quiet and difficult to hear. Not only that, but I could tell that the music in the game was only a segment of a longer song.
I had forgotten all about that until a couple weeks ago when I was playing flash games again and I thought of it. I went searching for the music again but couldn't find even the slightest clue as to where the original song might be. I did find walkthrough videos of the game on YouTube and I figured I could use an MP3 converter to download the video as an audio file and use that, but it had all the sound effects from the game in it too which is annoying because they cover up the music. And, even if it didn't have the sound effects, it would still only be a segment of the song and not the whole thing.
Frustrated, I thought maybe I could look up a tutorial for how to rip soundtracks from flash games. I figured it couldn't be too hard since so many people do it. I did find instructions on YouTube, but most of the tutorial videos assumed the viewer already knew how to save a flash game as something called an SWF file, which I had no idea how to do. One person's video involved using the toolbar on Internet Explorer to view all the files active in the game. I use Google Chrome instead of Internet Explorer, but I decided to try playing around with it to see if I could do something similar.
I loaded up the Save the Dummy game and then right clicked in the box, just because I didn't have a better plan, and I got two results, one that said "graphics" and the other that said "music." Exhilarated at the mention of music, I clicked the option, expecting it to open a file of some kind, but instead it was a link that opened a new tab on my browser and brought me to a Newgrounds page for a user called FeckDisShet. I was even more excited now because many of the obscure or random music tracks I've found through web games or videos have come from the Newgrounds audio portal. Unfortunately, FeckDisShet had deleted his profile, along with everything he had posted, and there was no trace of any music tracks there.
I was pissed off and thought that might have been the last hope I had for finally finding the soundtrack to Save the Dummy. In a futile attempt to produce some kind of result, I type "Newgrounds FeckDisShet" into Google and hit search. What I got were various Newgrounds pages for people wondering why this guy had deleted his profile. However, I got one result at the top that intrigued me. It was for a different profile called 4cat and the small text excerpt said something about a featured file. I clicked on it and found that 4cat and FeckDisShet had been sharing each other's music and animations. There was one and only one surviving audio file in 4cat's library, a music track called "Weak at the Knees." Curious, I clicked on it and hit play. The track started with a synthetic bass that sounded like it might be the song from Save the Dummy. I suddenly got really excited and held my breath waiting for the song to continue and see if it was the one I was looking for. About ten seconds in, the melody started and I started going crazy when I realized it was the track I was looking for.
I was so hyped by my success that I grabbed my laptop off the coffee table, plugged it into my computer speakers, cranked up the volume on my subwoofer, and started twirling in circles around my room with my eyes closed and bouncing off the walls as the entire song, not just the excerpt from Save the Dummy, blasted at full volume. I haven't felt that electrified in quite some time now, and for as silly and dumb as the reason was, finding some random music track from a flash game I played on the web when I was a high schooler, it felt like I was queen of the world or something.
Here's the song. It was never posted on YouTube so I just put this video up myself.
P.S. Sorry for the weird Gravity Rush wallpaper image set as the background. I didn't have anything else handy.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JccAQPRgU6E&feature=youtu.be]
I had forgotten all about that until a couple weeks ago when I was playing flash games again and I thought of it. I went searching for the music again but couldn't find even the slightest clue as to where the original song might be. I did find walkthrough videos of the game on YouTube and I figured I could use an MP3 converter to download the video as an audio file and use that, but it had all the sound effects from the game in it too which is annoying because they cover up the music. And, even if it didn't have the sound effects, it would still only be a segment of the song and not the whole thing.
Frustrated, I thought maybe I could look up a tutorial for how to rip soundtracks from flash games. I figured it couldn't be too hard since so many people do it. I did find instructions on YouTube, but most of the tutorial videos assumed the viewer already knew how to save a flash game as something called an SWF file, which I had no idea how to do. One person's video involved using the toolbar on Internet Explorer to view all the files active in the game. I use Google Chrome instead of Internet Explorer, but I decided to try playing around with it to see if I could do something similar.
I loaded up the Save the Dummy game and then right clicked in the box, just because I didn't have a better plan, and I got two results, one that said "graphics" and the other that said "music." Exhilarated at the mention of music, I clicked the option, expecting it to open a file of some kind, but instead it was a link that opened a new tab on my browser and brought me to a Newgrounds page for a user called FeckDisShet. I was even more excited now because many of the obscure or random music tracks I've found through web games or videos have come from the Newgrounds audio portal. Unfortunately, FeckDisShet had deleted his profile, along with everything he had posted, and there was no trace of any music tracks there.
I was pissed off and thought that might have been the last hope I had for finally finding the soundtrack to Save the Dummy. In a futile attempt to produce some kind of result, I type "Newgrounds FeckDisShet" into Google and hit search. What I got were various Newgrounds pages for people wondering why this guy had deleted his profile. However, I got one result at the top that intrigued me. It was for a different profile called 4cat and the small text excerpt said something about a featured file. I clicked on it and found that 4cat and FeckDisShet had been sharing each other's music and animations. There was one and only one surviving audio file in 4cat's library, a music track called "Weak at the Knees." Curious, I clicked on it and hit play. The track started with a synthetic bass that sounded like it might be the song from Save the Dummy. I suddenly got really excited and held my breath waiting for the song to continue and see if it was the one I was looking for. About ten seconds in, the melody started and I started going crazy when I realized it was the track I was looking for.
I was so hyped by my success that I grabbed my laptop off the coffee table, plugged it into my computer speakers, cranked up the volume on my subwoofer, and started twirling in circles around my room with my eyes closed and bouncing off the walls as the entire song, not just the excerpt from Save the Dummy, blasted at full volume. I haven't felt that electrified in quite some time now, and for as silly and dumb as the reason was, finding some random music track from a flash game I played on the web when I was a high schooler, it felt like I was queen of the world or something.
Here's the song. It was never posted on YouTube so I just put this video up myself.
P.S. Sorry for the weird Gravity Rush wallpaper image set as the background. I didn't have anything else handy.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JccAQPRgU6E&feature=youtu.be]
26-30, F
