In almost every game I have ever played in over 40+ years, I have listened to the music for about 10 minutes then muted it. To me, it's just a distraction and doesn't add anything, especially when the music contains voices. My friend tried to convince me that I was missing out and should listen to the Factorio soundtrack more. I did, and still wasn't impressed. Then my friend suggested the Nine Inch Nails group of music mods. That piqued my interest. While searching for it, I also discovered this (Preceti's Music Experiment) mod. I decided to try both. I was not all that impressed with the NIN one.

But holy crap, when I got around to trying this mod... for the first time EVER, in my 40+ year history of playing video games, I not only sometimes catch myself just spacing out on the game while I listen to the music, but I even hesitate at the main menu just to listen to the music play for a little while. I can't quite tell if it's one song or three, but if it is split into several songs, then the one that says "Roots run deep in Nauvis" is definitely my favorite. The music on this mod is just amazing!

I can't quite tell if it's one song or three, but if it is split into several songs, then the one that says "Roots run deep in Nauvis" is definitely my favorite. The music on this mod is just amazing!

Hey thank you that's super flattering ! :) In game you can use a programmable speaker to play each song from this mod as you wish to make your own juke box so you don't space out the game anymore but you can make the game about playing the music :)

The song you mentionned is a bit of an exception, i noticed now that it is the only song missing a proper description, the title is Electree-Hug, it's on the folder DJROBOTMIXTAPE1, it was added as a replacement of another song, supposed to be in short sample for the other mod more about playing the music with circuit, part of the more energetic songs, but it was left "pending".

It was made using different AIs, the idea was to have a song with the spirits of roots reggae somehow, and the relation with the nature and trees, but with a somewhat angry tone, as if the trees in the game were a bit fed up with the engineers behavior. It start by "I touched some grass bro !" because that's something i'm told to do sometimes on the internet, but i touch a lot of grass IRL x), the angry tone is also my answer, and i feel it suits the game because there's a message in the song, the trees will protect your base with their leafy arms against the pollution, they are the guardians protecting the world for big and small, humans but also little insects, but this cannot be said in angry tone, this is the "tree-hug" part, the "peace part".
For the music i choose for the angry/powerful parts sections that were generated by AI that reminded me of the "water of nazareth" song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHcPUTfPuk0 mixed with "new-school"80's synthwave for the tempo/rythm such as "14h54" or "11h30" from artist "Danger" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU-Nb75jyEU
The singing is from SUNO , and openVINO was used to separate the stem so i could use the vocal as if they were recorded for the song, and also to extend some of the instrumental sections to make the desired structure with intro and outro.

I remember the replacement/release was made one day were there was forest fire on world news, it's also my way of saying i'm in the team that cares even though i'm running experiments with AIs :)

I had to delete comment from another user calling me dishonnest for failing to be upfront about my use of AI because after asking : "how can i be more upfront ?", there was nothing i could actually do, instead it was full of bullshit, taking as example a song from the DJ mod, which is explictly described as AI music in the mod description and saying an AI detector was used and resulted in a 69% chance that the song was "AI generated", and then a link to personnal website so full of ads, not a single thing was visible with adblocker on.

I added a mention in the FAQ for later.

I believe it is a good illustration of the "42" answer in H2G2, here the detector said "69% chance it was made by AI" which i found dumb, because it's explained in the description that roughly 100% of the sound came from AI, but first it was a generative AI used to create hours of sound, and a few loops were selected kept and worked on to be extended by another AI on local, only 4 second at a time to recreate a song from my favourite parts, and then some other AI were used to separate the different "instruments" from the continuation by the 2nd AI of the "sound" from the 1rst, process called "stem extraction". From those parts i sampled some pieces and edited them to make the intro and outro of the songs and stich the whole thing together.

Lately I found sometimes useful to give the "finished sound" to yet a 4rth AI for the "mastering", but i'm not keeping it as is, instead i download the duplicate version, and merge some parts so the whole song is not receiving the same kind of "post -process", that helps for certain parts, it goes beyond the mastering, similar to AI upscale, where it hallucinate some details, such AI can recreate/hallucinate sound that weren't there in the first place, which i found particularly useful for the high frequencies.

So really tp me all the "sound" of that "song" was AI generated ... and there's no real way for a detector to identify the process that happened. I may have added a clap sample in some part, or enhanced the kick in a drop , or added a filter for some frequencies at some part where i found it was too noisy or the bass was having too low frequencies for ears and hardware, adjusted tempo, you can also give a song to an AI and it convert it in the music sheet, with some inaccuracies, but that can be worked with to recreate some backings to some AI parts, there are plenty of ways you can "experiment" that's kinda like the purpose of those mods, it started with the DJmod and only a few AI song to test the technical capabilities of the factorio sound engine. Then it made me want to try following tutorial to make music on a real software for music production without AIs. So i made songs like this, but it didn't stop me from experimenting with AIs, which is why i try to document the process of creation for each song, to let people know what they are listening to if they are interested.

I'm quite embarassed i didn't document this particular "Electree-Hug" song at the time, but i think i did follow the same guidelines of transparency when fixing my mistake when noticing. I also do this for myself, because i do a lot of "work" on "many" songs that i don't finish or publish, i just like toying around with ideas sometimes, and rework them later, but i don't necessarily remember all that was done, particularly when it's so late at night it's the morning already and i leave the computer with several stuff opens between which i can't decide, not a good sign generally, but a week later, maybe the "loop25" and "loop32_verion4zef" sound like they could work together for another song and i don't remember what i did different with "loop24" and 23 and why i have so many version of loop32 that look like they were quickly named. That's the limit to the transparency !

I believe having split the music in different smaller mod will allow for more consistency in between tracks of the same "album", possibly by "mood" but there's still some work to do.

Edit : @ user if you are going to repost the same thing, i'm going to delete it again, don't be stupid