Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Online

Jazz Jackrabbit 2 has some really wonderful music, but we cannot play it on our MP3 players. Why? They are in a format generally known as music “Modules”

What are Modules? Where as MP3s and WAVs are a single sound recording, Modules (And their simplier cousins, MIDI) are a series of sound samples that play when a script calls for that sample, much like how Guitar Hero works. The advantage here is quality sound at a much smaller filesize, which was important for software designers.

One of the applications used to create and edit modules is Modplug (http://sourceforge.net/projects/modplug/) We will use this tool first in our project.

Converting modules to MP3s is quite simple, but the process is time consuming if you want decent audio.

You see, MP3s are compressed audio, and compression mean loss of quality. This is shown by the Bitrate, the number of bits used per unit of playback time. The higher the number, the more clear your music will be.

Modplug Tracker has a “Save as MP3” function, but the maximum bitrate it can save as is limited to 56kbps. As a result, music will sound like it is being played by a cheap radio. (For comparison, the default BR for Audio track rippers is 128kbps) There is a way to save the audio at higher bitrates, but we need another tool.

That way is with Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), a program used to edit WAV and MP3 files. You are going to need LAME (http://lame.buanzo.com.ar/) to be able to save the file as an MP3.

What we do is save the file as a .WAV file, then loading that file into Audacity, we can save in any bitrate we want.

In summery, To do this you will need:
-Modplug Tracker
-Audacity with the LAME plugin
-A folder on your desktop to save the WAVs in and make searching for them easier.

Now, here are the directions:

1.In Modplug Tracker, load the module you want to convert.
2.In the File menu, select “Save as wave file”
3.A box will appear asking for the location to save and the quality to save it in (The higher the better)
4. A saving bar will popup and tick away. when it is done, You can close Modplug
(Note: Don’t be too surprised if the wav file is huge. The largest one I made was just over 128mb.)
5. Start Audacity
6. In the File menu, select “Import wav”
7. Open the WAV file you just saved from Modplug
8. The file will take a little to be imported.
9. In file, Select “Export as MP3”
10. From here, you can add the music tag, the Bitrate to be saved (Again, the higher the better) and what filename to save it as.
11. Once saved, you can close Audacity and delete the WAV file.

You now have a freshly converted Module!