Just wondering what the consensus is. As insane as this sounds, I prefer the Soundblaster music as it's more nostalgic to me. Being an ex-RuneScaper (back when I was young and foolish), hearing those General MIDI instruments reminds me too much of RuneScape.

I think the Soundblaster music makes the game feel more serious too, especially the "Snowing" and "Night" tracks. Unfortunately for me, dungeons lack music in this case (just bad ambience), and that tavern only plays that same evil 100 dB song, as well as the stores.

Also, what are your favorite tracks? Me...

-Snowing: A very ambient and beautiful track, I always think of it when it's snowing in Daggerfall.
-Night: Maybe that's the wrong name. It's that sad song in Daggerfall before you banish Lysandus' spirit. Reminds me of something out of Last Crusade, for some reason.
-Evil Tavern Music: Not the loud cheery one, but the one ported from Arena. Yeah, two are ported. Umm, the "dee, doodooDEE!" one. The one you don't hear in stores with General MIDI on.

Of course, I think we can mostly agree Daggerfall's music is all amazing.

I prefer General MIDI. Sounds better and the game play some extra songs that won't play with the Sound Blaster setting.

There are plenty of other DOS games in which I prefer Sound Blaster over General MIDI, though. Like System Shock.

I prefer the music on General Midi to the sound blaster. All the Daggerfall songs are fantastic IMO and really fit in with the enviroments. I can't pick a outright favorite. There's one song that I don't know the name of that nearly had me crying after I'd spent 3 hours on a dungeon crawl going round in circles... The song was playing in the background as I finally got out of the dungeon and tasted the cool night air

I'd vote for mute if it wasn't also a vote for Linkin Park.

General midi for me. I agree that the SB set has the better snowing tune, but general midi has better overall quality and I like having multiple tavern songs, etc. And while that obnoxious shop tune is catchy at first and bring back good memories, it's a bit grating--so I prefer the gentler melody in the midi.

Favorite tracks, in addition to the universally adored snowing tune, would be a few of the nighttime songs, such as the one you tend to hear outside cemeteries. Raining is a good one, too. And the dungeons, while most don't have music per se rather than a few pipes every now and then and ambient noises tossed around, are certainly mood setting. The one that plays in the Scourg Barrow has a nice rift (ba-dump, ching!).

I liked Arena's weaponsmiths, that had the remix of Arena's opening theme, which by the way, sounds better in Soundblaster.

I prefer Arena in Soundblaster, much moreso than Daggerfall, but whatever.

You have gone TOO FAR!

Right now I'm trying out the Roland thing in both Arena and Daggerfall. It's quite different from the other stuff I've tried. Not sure which I prefer though.

How did you manage Roland emulation? Do you need a Roland sound card? For me Roland emulation just sounds essentially like General MIDI.

Roland virtual sound canvas software is the closest you can get to emulating a real roland card, I use it on XP with DosBox and it sounds 90% near enough to my real roland card, you can pick it up on ebay quite cheap. Yes roland emulation does sound a bit like General Midi but you get extra instruments and drums if the midi music was wrote specially for the sound canvas like Daggerfall and many other DOS games.

...

Well, I finally managed to (read: finally had time to) convert the entire DF soundtrack over to mp3. All 118 tracks. I'll have them uploaded to filefront tomorrow. Was more of a task than I thought it would be! Had to first convert the midi to wav--in real time, which took over 4 hours--and now from wav to mp3. Winamp just wouldn't go directly to mp3 without purchasing some lame addon (and I couldn't find a better free program to do it than winamp), so I had to two-step it. Still, quality sounds very good, although there's about 3 or 4 seconds of silence at the end of most (maybe all) tracks, but those were on the original midi files I had, so I claim no responsibility

[edit] And here's the link: http://files.filefront.com/Daggerfall+Musiczip/;12710847;/fileinfo.html

So, in light of that, a few questions for the gurus who aren't me: What's the differences between the tracks? There are quite a few groups--different sets for different soundcards, I know, but which ones go together is a mystery.

There are tracks 02 through 30, with 9 of those having a ##FM pair.
There are then D1 through D10, each with an FM pair
Then there are a slew of other tracks, some with prefixes of F, FM, G, and none at all.

I can tell that the F tracks seem to go with the soundblaster set (I recognize the shop tune in there) while the Gs go with the general midi. Other than that, well...

soundblaster, i didn't play long with general midi though, mostly it didn't sound 'right' because i had played it previously with soundblaster

whoa awesome. thanks.

118 tracks?? this game had great atmosphere.

Awesome, a definitive set of ALL the music. Good job, Jormungandr! Have a fishy stick!

It seems more people prefer Soundblaster for Arena. Yay! The only General Midi track I like in Arena is the intro theme, which is already awesome enough.

I've never played Arena, I guess the only TES game I haven't played. How are the controls, can you use WASD and mouselook?

It's similar to the default Daggerfall mapping. It can unfortunately not be changed though.

No mouselook, only the Daggerfall option with the always-visible cursor. Arena is not true 3D, it's like DOOM - just elevated and sunken areas, but no way to have two things above and below one another. As such, there is no point in it. The ceiling is obnoxiously low in all places.