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I recreated the unreleased Brian Tyler LU soundtrack


Zeb
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Short version

 

I recreated Brian Tyler's LEGO Universe Soundtrack. Here's a torrent magnet link for a lossless quality download:

 

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:45c96025e45ea77a2281882aac9b39b0a57aa467&dn=Brian%20Tyler%27s%20Soundtrack%20Rebuilt

 

Long version

 

Brian Tyler, composer of most of the music in the release version of LEGO Universe, used to have a LEGO Universe soundtrack album listed on his website. Presumably, if LU had not been shut down so soon, this soundtrack would have been released on Amazon and iTunes. Though the unreleased album has since been removed from his site, you can still view it via web archives. Though this official soundtrack was never actually released, high-quality copies of the music can be extracted from the LU client files. Additionally, the page for the unreleased album included an ordered tracklist, complete with run time lengths for each track.

 

Recently, thanks to the previously-linked tutorial by Meticulix, I extracted all the in-game music files from the release version of the LU client. The music was stored in multiple .fsb files. Most were specific to a particular world. The tracks in these .fsb files were usually the intro/looped versions of the tracks. However, there were a few .fsb files that were not tied to any particular world, specifically "music_global_depot_streaming.fsb" and "music_global_streaming.fsb". These contained full versions of all of Brian Tyler's tracks.

 

Of course, this isn't the first time I found these tracks. Neal Spellman uploaded a whole bunch of the tracks to YouTube years ago. However, I was annoyed that there was no high quality download for the tracks anywhere. There were only compressed YouTube uploads and .mp3 collections.

 

Upon examining Brian Tyler's tracklist, I began to realize that the track order was not just an alphabetical or random list. Rather, tracks seemed to be put in a very intentional order, with each track generally flowing well into the next one. The short tracks weren't all lumped together at the end, nor were tracks merely grouped together based on where they appeared in-game. Rather, the tracklist order seemed to be based on the sound and feel of the music itself. Personally, I think a good track order can greatly enhance the overall listening experience of an album, so this discovery excited me.

 

So, seeing Brian Tyler's tracklist, and having now extracted all the music from the game files, I decided to try recreating the unreleased LU album using the high quality music files.

 

It's worth noting that the Brian Tyler track names didn't always line up 1:1 with the extracted music file names. The extracted files would often have a name like "LUMX_FV_MAIN_GATE", while the Brian Tyler tracklist would include a track named "The Main Gate at Forbidden Valley". In most cases, it was fairly simple to determine which track was which: just look for a file with a name that sounds similar and which has a similar runtime.

 

Usually, Brian Tyler's track lengths were 2-3 seconds longer, with a few exceptions. I suspect these deltas are simply a result of added silence between most tracks (which makes sense for a music album).

 

Thankfully, most of the work had already been done by Neal Spellman, VezonWireless, and Jamesster. They had already managed to figure out the proper titles for most tracks. However, there were a few cases where I wasn't fully convinced by the popular belief, and upon looking into it further, I came to a different conclusion:

 

  • I think "Avant Gardens Landing" is "LUMX_AG LANDING", not "LUMX_LANDING".
  • I think "Mountain Tops" is "LUMX_FV_MOUNTAIN_TOP_TRANSITI", not the Frostburgh property track "LUMX_Winter_Property". Winter Property is just "Brick Annex" with sleigh bell overdubs, and "Brick Annex" already shows up later in Brian Tyler's soundtrack. I don't think Brian Tyler would put a slight remix of a track into the track order before the original version. I think the only case where he used the same recorded material twice is "LEGO Universe" at the end of the album.
  • I think "The Power of Imagination" is "LUMX_LANDING", not "LUMX_FV_MOUNTAIN_TOP_TRANSITI".
  • I think that "Our Universe" and "Avant Gardens Landing" were spliced together into "LEGO Universe". I've seen some people say that those first two tracks are remixes of the latter, but in my opinion, it's clear that "LEGO Universe" is a mashup created by editing together those first two tracks. "Avant Gardens Landing" has an intro missing from "LEGO Universe" that doesn't sound edited-on to me. Additionally, the transition in "Our Universe" to its middle section sounds more natural than the transition from the "Our Universe" part of "LEGO Universe" to the "Avant Gardens Landing" part.

 

Someone may want to update the LU wiki with this info if they agree with my conclusions.

 

One thing that puzzled me a bit was the track length of "A Powerful Darkness on the Horizon". By process of elimination and common sense, it seemed like it would be "LUMX_BRIG_ROCK". Yet Brian Tyler's given track length was 3:48, while "LUMX_BRIG_ROCK" was a noticeably longer 4:57. I ended up noticing that the looped version of the track ("LUMX_Brig-RockLoop") was 3:27. This looped version cut off a lot of the opening to the track as well as some of the ending. I realized that by cutting "LUMX_BRIG_ROCK" to start at the same point as "LUMX_Brig-RockLoop", but having the track continue into the ending (but fading out a bit earlier than the original track), the track became approximately 3:48 long. So that's what I did; I figure that's how it would have been on the unreleased album.

 

I also noticed that "LUMX_TORTOISE_TERRACE" was about 10 seconds longer than the "Tortoise Terrace" track length. I discovered that cutting off the earliest part of the intro would cut the time down to the matching length, but in this case I decided not to bother since I couldn't get it to sound quite right and I personally liked those opening 10 seconds.

 

Finally, "LUMX_PIRATE_COVE_1" was a somewhat unusual 7 seconds shorter than the "Pirate Cove" length, but I figure this track would have just had some more empty space surrounding it.

 

(Aside from "A Poweful Darkness on the Horizon", I did not modify any of the other tracks to add any of the empty space suggested by Brian Tyler's track lengths... partially because I like the shorter space between tracks in most cases, and partially because I didn't want to go through the trouble of making "album versions" of all 33 tracks.)

 

So after a few days of work, I managed to recreate Brian Tyler's LU soundtrack in its entirety. I've also included some alternate mixes of tracks in a bonus folder, including things like the "no koto" version of "Paradox" and the separate versions of "Gorilla Combat" and "The Cave". All tracks have been converted to the FLAC format, meaning they are the same quality as the raw music files, but compressed to a much smaller file size with zero quality loss! They also have all been tagged with metadata like track number and artist name (in this case always Brian Tyler). The "Title" tag of each track includes the file name used in the .fsb files. There is also a .m3u playlist to allow for quick and easy playing of the entire soundtrack.

 

(Side note: "LUMX_Winter_Property" is technically 5:40 long, but after 2:10, there's nothing but completely dead silence (and I mean 100% total silence), so I chopped all that off in the copy included in my collection.)

 

Here's a torrent magnet link to download the album:

 

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:45c96025e45ea77a2281882aac9b39b0a57aa467&dn=Brian%20Tyler%27s%20Soundtrack%20Rebuilt

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lol username

Since I didn't see mention of it skimming your post - the soundtrack was officially released on a bonus CD included with special editions of the game, which AFAIK was only given to devs/other people directly involved with the game, but it's ended up in the hands of various other folks. If I remember correctly, I got a copy of it from @Brigs (and I think @Neal has a copy too). It also had some exclusive concept art and such (which has long been uploaded to the wiki).

 

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Woah! I had no clue that even existed. I've never seen any mention of this anywhere. It looks like most of the tracks got renamed, and the track order is very different as well.

 

Is there any chance I could get a copy? (Preferably in lossless quality, but I'll gladly take mp3s if that's all you have; I guess I could line up and recut the HQ files to match the mp3s and construct a HQ version of the apparently final version of the album.)

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You're amazing Zeb, huge thanks for making this! And for giving great detail about your process too.

Edit: I've uploaded it to Mega here if anyone prefers that to a torrent link, I hope you don't mind?

 

And seconded regarding the CD, either an ISO upload or a FLAC rip with something like Exact Audio Copy would be superb!

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7 hours ago, JimbobJeffers said:

You're amazing Zeb, huge thanks for making this! And for giving great detail about your process too.

Edit: I've uploaded it to Mega here if anyone prefers that to a torrent link, I hope you don't mind?

I don't mind at all! Feel free to upload my collection anywhere and everywhere you want!

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