Unofficial Tex Murphy

OK, I know that this is probably a longshot, but I had to ask.

There is a scene in Overseer right after Tex escapes from Robert Knott's cabin when the terrorists (?) storm the house and kill Knott. Immediately after the explosion of Knott's cabin, we see Tex in the restaurant with Chelsee lighting his cigarette with the cook's flaming food plate. After a couple of dialogue lines, we see Tex entering his office to find his client, Sylvia, waiting for him. Throughout the entire FMV scene in Tex's office there is a beautiful and very memorable musical piece featuring some great saxophone music and some electronic keyboard material as well. Kinda something like Vangelis' style of implementing soft romance and slow electronica.

Anyway, to the subject at hand, I listened to the Overseer soundtrack some time ago and unfortunately that exact piece was not present there. So, I loaded up Overviewer and figured out the scene file, which is C41.000 in CD4. I was able to play the file with RADTools which of course plays Bink files. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a way of extracting the audio stream from that file, and even if I was able to, the dialogue of Tex/Chelsee/Sylvia is kind of in the way of the music.

So, my question is simple. Is there any way I can get hold of that particular music piece (minus the dialogue in the background of course), preferably in decent quality? Again, I realize that this is quite a longshot, but I loved that piece so much, I had to ask.

Any help will be greatly appreciated...

I sure hope so; it's a great piece of music.

Is Overviewer still available for download? That'd be my suggestion...

Maybe you could record the music as it plays to the speakers (on Macs you could use WireTap, not sure about PC's) and then try to edit out the extraneous background sounds?

Andy wrote:Is Overviewer still available for download? That'd be my suggestion...

Maybe you could record the music as it plays to the speakers (on Macs you could use WireTap, not sure about PC's) and then try to edit out the extraneous background sounds?

Yes, Overviewer is available for download HERE, and I have already mentioned it in my post.

I have thought of something similar to what you suggest. Recording the audio stream is the fairly easy part, trying to edit out the dialogue is the far more complex process and unfortunately the resulting output of such a process will be very low quality and virtually unlistenable. You see, since the dialogue is overlapping the music and is in fact an integral part of the audio stream, any attempt to remove it or edit it out will result in bad audio quality output. Following this suggestion will allow you to separate the music from the dialogue and other background noises, but as far as I know, the resulting output will not be good, to say the least. Think of it like this, you have an MP3 with some great background music, but you want to remove the singer's lyrics in order to make a playback of the song (music ONLY), the result will not be pretty. Besides, I wouldn't even know where to begin as far as audio editing at this level.

Also, unfortunately I do not own a Mac, so trying the WireTap thing is a bit out of my range.

Thanks for the suggestion though...

That's at least as far as my audio editing experience goes. I could be wrong though... If anyone here would know anything about this it's probably Cubase who appears to have some extensive experience with the intricacies of audio editing, of which I'm far from being an expert on.

Give us a hand, Cub?

Well, I tried recording the Audio stream and ran a Vocal Cut filter through the sound, but as you said, it did not fair too well... not nearly as good as it should.

The trouble is, Tex has a very nasal voice which happens to produce both low and high frequencies making a vocal cut of his voice nearly impossible. Not to mention having two other female voices to account for.

Anyway, here was the best I was able to come up with:

Sylvias Song

The vocals are still there, but I was able to up the amplitude of the music to make it dominte rather than the dialogue... thus giving you a clearer picture of the piece itself.

Now there is one other very high tech method to get a clear audio stream out of this using only e-mail: I will get in touch with Matt Heider and see if he can send me the original. This method tends to work best.

-Cub. =o)

Wow, thanks a lot for the lightning-quick reply...

I've just listened to the piece you uploaded and my original suspicions were correct. While the music is indeed more dominant this time around, you can still make out the voices (especially Tex's voice, as you mentioned) and the audio quality itself is a bit too monotonic.

I'm very grateful for the effort though, and that email thingie - very high-tech indeed... Let's hope Matt Heider still has the original recording sample at his disposal. It does seem like the best solution.

Thanks a bunch for the help, let us know how it turns out. I just adore that piece and would love to get hold of a good sample of it.