Top Gear Rally [N64] Soundtrack
The N64 was Nintendo’s first true console to delve solidly in the 3D space. With more power than the Playstation and Saturn, the N64 more than made it’s place in history with the quality of it’s games.
However, unlike it’s rivals, it was cartridge based. While the console could play audio tracks, the cartridges lacked the space to include them. This meant that most soundtracks were either mono audio, MIDI files or a combination of the two (Goldeneye is a good example of this mix).
However Top Gear Rally’s musician, Barry Leitch, decided to keep the soundtrack distinctly old school. Rather than trying to emulate CD audio, he instead made a soundtrack exactly the same way you would for a 16-bit machine – he programmed in 8 bit samples that were produced live off of the hardware. This has meant emulation of Top Gear Rally’s music has never been accurate, it also makes it one of the most advanced cases of this traditional technique thanks to the number of samples available to Leitch from the hardware. As quoted from Barry Leitch on website The Cutting Room Floor,
““Top Gear Rally for the N64, probably the only N64 game ever to use 8 bit samples…”
There were two different title tracks for Top Gear Rally. The PAL/JAP versions were energetic and very trance-techno in theme. The US version was much more mellow. In Barry Leitch’s own words;
“For some reason I was asked to do a mellow title tune for the game… then suddenly for the Japanese release I was asked to do a more up tempo one.”
NOTE: This soundtrack will be added to, the US version’s Title Track will be added within the next month from 26/06/2016.
Recorded and Mastered on 25-06-2016
Tracklist:
- Title Screen [PAL]
- Coastline
- Jungle
- Mountain
- Desert
- Strip Mine
Download
Audiophile – FLAC 96/24
Free Lossless Audio Codec / 96,000hz / 24bit
Casual Listener – FLAC CD
Free Lossless Audio Codec / 44,100 hz / 16bit
Portable Player – MP3
MPEG Audio Layer III / 192khz
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