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Ogg Vorbis - it has better sound quality than MIDI but the filesize is bigger

3 (17.6%)

MIDI - it has smaller filesize than Ogg Vorbis but the sound quality isn't as good

5 (29.4%)

BOTH! - have the executable support both formats and detect which is present in the art directory, and offer both as options

7 (41.2%)

Neither - the game shouldn't have music at all

2 (11.8%)

Other (please explain)

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 17

[Liberal Elitist]

Hi I'm adding a new poll here on Ogg Vorbis vs. MIDI vs. MOD as the best format to use for music in Liberal Crime Squad. Unlike the last poll I did I tried to make this poll not sound biased in favor of any answer.

Right now the SVN versions of the game use MIDI music but this could easily be changed to Ogg Vorbis which has better sound quality but larger filesize. The main drawback of Ogg Vorbis is it would make the game take up more disk space and make the download size a lot bigger (Ogg Vorbis files, unlike MIDI files, are not compressible any further if you put them in ZIP files, so they stay just as big). But Ogg sounds better than MIDI. So it's a simple tradeoff between filesize and sound quality. Which do you think is more important? If you want good sound quality choose Ogg Vorbis, if you want small filesize choose MIDI.

There are also other formats besides these 2 that could be used but none of them would make any sense to use:
1) MP3 - it has worse sound quality than Ogg Vorbis at the same filesize and is also patent-encumbered causing legal issues
2) FLAC - it has better sound quality than Ogg Vorbis because it's lossless but the filesize is outrageously big, and with a high-bitrate Ogg Vorbis the difference between Ogg Vorbis and FLAC is not noticeable to most listeners (although the bitrate we would use for Ogg Vorbis might not necessarily be high, it could also be medium or low)
3) WAV - WAV sounds identical to FLAC as both are lossless but the files are many times bigger making them REALLY outrageously big for no reason
4) MOD - it is too hard to find MOD files of specific public domain music, and MOD is pretty much equivalent to MIDI in terms of filesize and sound quality but with the disadvantage of being much more obscure... MOD is basically a chiptunes format for the audio chip found on the Commodore Amiga so all of the audio would have a chiptunes sound to it and sound very artificial like a bunch of beeps and boops and some people like that but others don't, it certainly doesn't sound anything like an actual audio recording though, but the main obstacle here is if you are looking for a specific song in the MOD format you are unlikely to find it and will probably have to spend a lot of time and effort putting that file into the MOD format yourself (in this case it would be me having to do all this work probably and I have no interest in doing that)
5) Opus - Opus is the best quality lossy audio codec in existence developed as the state-of-the-art next-generation successor format to Ogg Vorbis (it has better sound quality at lower bitrates than any other lossy audio codec) but it is such a new format that it's hard to find a library that could play it back; there is an unofficial SDL2_mixer branch that supports Opus but it is untested and may have problems according to its own author's admission, and while it has .DLL files for libopus and libopusfile, it doesn't provide .DLL files for SDL2_mixer or .lib or .a files to link against in MS Visual C++ or Code::Blocks so we would need to compile and build it the music-opus branch of SDL2_mixer in both MS Visual C++ and in MinGW-GCC to produce the necessary files to link against and use as the .DLL for SDL2_mixer at runtime, and also using an unofficial branch of SDL2_mixer means it wouldn't receive any support from the main SDL project and it might not necessarily be maintained or work properly in the future; as for obtaining files in the Opus format we could simply convert files that are in a lossless format like FLAC or WAV into Opus, that is not too difficult, but overall I don't think it's a good idea to have a dependency on an unstable, unofficial branch that has known problems according to its own author... later on Opus might become an official format supported by the SDL and SDL_mixer projects someday, maybe in a year or two or three or when the next major version like SDL version 3 comes out but that probably won't be for quite awhile (so anyway I have no interest in putting in all the work necessary to use this format which isn't supported by the official SDL project and isn't supported by other cross-platform audio file playback libraries either, and think it would be a bad idea because it would make the project have a dependency on unstable untested code that doesn't have any support)

So those other 5 formats for various reasons don't make sense to use since either the filesize is too big (FLAC, WAV), the sound quality for the filesize is bad (WAV, MP3), there are legal problems (MP3), the sound quality isn't that good (MOD), or the feasibility of using the format is bad (MOD, Opus).

So the only 2 serious contenders are Ogg Vorbis and MIDI, both of which are quite common formats that it is quite easy to find public domain music in, and are also very well supported by SDL2_mixer. And between Ogg Vorbis and MIDI there is basically just a tradeoff between sound quality and filesize: Ogg Vorbis is better sound quality but bigger filesize, and MIDI is smaller filesize but worse sound quality.

So I encourage people to vote on this. I am actually somewhat undecided between the 2 formats myself. Although I originally put in MIDI music and was leaning in that direction, now I am not as sure and I could really go either way on MIDI vs. Ogg Vorbis as far as game music. The main reason I went with MIDI is actually I was worried that big filesize might get some of the players of the game upset because the game would be too large of a download and take up too much disk space, since it has always been quite a small game in terms of disk space in the past, and I wanted to avoid any sort of backlash or criticism over that. But then there was backlash and criticism over the low sound quality of MIDI and then I realized my predictions of how other people would react were incorrect. So I am fairly neutral on this but I will go ahead and cast my vote for Ogg Vorbis instead of MIDI this time because I think that maybe the sound quality should take precedence over disk space and because a lot of the MIDI files I found don't sound as good as some Ogg recordings I might be able to get for the same songs.

Anyway, either choice, Ogg Vorbis or MIDI, is equally valid from my point of view, but the other 5 choices that I listed all have significant drawbacks and I don't think any of them would be suitable choices for the game.

[seth--]

May be mor usefull to encode the music with both formats and then compare both quality and file size with real data

[Liberal Elitist]

Most of the songs I included in the game (which are all public-domain) have Wikipedia pages about them. And almost every one of those Wikipedia pages has an Ogg recording of that song that is freely available under a license that allows it to be used in an open-source game. Anyway here is a typical comparison:

Gustav Holst's "Mars" movement of "The Planets" symphony:
siege.mid in art directory - 56.8 KB (58,263 bytes)
Ogg file from Wikipedia - 6.95 MB (7,298,204 bytes) - it is possible to re-encode at a lower bitrate if we want smaller filesize though... it is a variable bitrate Ogg file with an average bitrate of 122 kbps... we could re-encode it at the minimum Ogg bitrate of 64 kbps and then the filesize would be about half as big, about 3 and a half megabytes. It would be best to re-encode it as Ogg from a lossless original recording such as a FLAC recording, but re-encoding at such a low bitrate it probably wouldn't really matter either way.

Currently there are 34 MIDI files with a total file size of 1.05 MB (1,107,660 bytes). If compressed into a ZIP file with really good compression, this reduces the file size of the distribution of them to 309 KB (316,745 bytes). Compressing Ogg files in a ZIP file doesn't reduce the size at all, they are merely stored as-is, because Ogg is already a compressed format and you can't compress something that's already compressed.

That covers filesize. As for audio quality, go ahead and listen to the recording from Wikipedia above, it sounds pretty nice.

So the 34 songs range in duration from the shortest one that's 52 seconds long (elections.mid, the aria Habanera from the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet) to the longest one that's 10 minutes and 10 seconds long (interrogation.mid, Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky)... both of which are available as public domain recordings on Wikipedia, from the Musopen project... you can listen to them there. The durations of the Ogg versions of both of those on Wikipedia are longer than the MIDI versions.

So the average song is roughly 5 minutes long. At 64 kbps (64 kilobits per second), which is also 8 kiloBYTES per second, 5 minutes, or 300 seconds, comes out to 8 x 300 = 2400 kilobytes for the average Ogg file, about 2.34 megabytes since a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes not 1000. So we'll round this to 2 and 1/3 megabytes (or 7/3 megabytes). Multiplied by 34, this comes out to about 79 megabytes, for all of the music.

So the difference in music size is 1.05 megabytes versus an estimated 79 megabytes for all of the music (if we encode it using the lowest possible bitrate of 64 kbps for Ogg, which still sounds pretty decent).

So including Ogg music for all those songs would make the download size of the game much bigger, it would be 80-something megabytes I estimate. But the music sound quality would sound better.

Anyway I guess you can see why I thought maybe MIDI would be a good format based on disk space concerns, since I thought making the game take up that many megabytes might be controversial. Right now a .ZIP file of the entire game with really good compression, including all the MIDI files, takes up 1.22 MB (1,283,005 bytes), and the entire game, when you extract it onto disk and it's no longer compressed, is 2.92 MB (3,064,271 bytes). So if we add about 79 megabytes to it, well then it'll be many, many times as big. Well OK, 78 megabytes, since we'd subtract 1 megabyte for the MIDI files we're replacing.

But the sound quality would be much nicer if we use Ogg. The only downside is that the download for the game would be many times bigger. I didn't originally use Ogg, but used MIDI instead, because of filesize concerns. But several people have complained about the sound quality of MIDI and said they'd like Ogg better, in the thread about MIDI music. So, those are some basic statistics on the filesize... switching to Ogg would add about 78 megabytes to the size, and that's a rough estimate, it could be lower or higher, that's just the general ballpark estimate. To allow for more uncertainty I'd say it could be anything from 50-100 megabytes and possibly a little over 100 megabytes. But it would sound nicer.

Anyway, you can change your vote on this poll at any time. You aren't stuck with your original vote. In fact I'm going to change my own vote from Ogg Vorbis to MIDI right after I post this, now that I've analyzed this more. Strike that, it appears you can't change your vote on this poll. I tried to enable changing your vote but I guess it didn't work.

Now let's consider the Opus codec again, that next-generation codec that there's an experimental branch of SDL2_mixer with support for it. It can still have fairly nice-sounding quality even at very low bitrates, lower than 64 kbps. It supports bitrates as low as 6 kbps. At 6 kbps instead of 64 kbps, to use the most extreme example of a low bitrate to save disk space, Opus would take up about 225 kilobytes for the average 5-minute song, and if you multiply that by 34 songs, you get about 7.5 megabytes. Now that probably wouldn't sound very nice since the bitrate would be extremely low... bitrates that low are just considered suitable for speech, not music. And it would still be several times bigger than the MIDI files which are just 1.05 megabytes. At such a low bitrate it would probably sound worse than them. But Opus audio at 48 kbps sounds pretty decent for music. It would take up 3/4 of the space of 64 kbps Ogg... so instead of being around 80 megs it'd be around 60 megs. Still big though. Plus if we used that experimental branch of SDL2_mixer we'd have to include all the source code for it as part of the source code of Liberal Crime Squad itself or else we'd give people on UNIX-based systems a complete nightmare for compiling.

OK, so Opus would make it much harder to maintain the project with such an unstable untested dependency as that SDL2_mixer unofficial branch and wouldn't offer any major improvement over Ogg Vorbis other than being able to encode at lower bitrates that don't sound as good and if it doesn't sound as good that defeats the whole purpose of using a format that sounds better than MIDI. Let's forget about Opus and just think about it as Ogg Vorbis vs. MIDI. Switching to 64 kbps Ogg Vorbis from MIDI would make the compressed ZIP of the game about 65 times bigger and the uncompressed game after you extract it about 28 times bigger (both being about 80 megabytes). So, is that what we want or not?

Hmm I guess we could also give the MOD format another look, it has full support by SDL2_mixer and comparable filesize and quality to MIDI. The only difficulty with it would be converting all the music to the MOD format, that would be a REAL pain in the buttocks. It would give everything a nice chiptunes-like sound. If you've ever used a crack or keygen to pirate software and it had music playing in the background, those all use the MOD format, so anyone out there involved in software piracy probably knows what MOD music sounds like. Not that I know anything about software piracy myself, I just read that information on Wikipedia, I obviously have no firsthand knowledge of such a thing, I'm a law-abiding citizen, this is just secondhand knowledge from the Wikipedia article about MOD music. Anyway though, I like the sound of MOD music, it would just be a total pain to convert music into the MOD format and take vast, huge amounts of time and effort, and it wouldn't really sound much better than MIDI, and if you're someone who doesn't like chiptunes-type sounds that are all like beeps and boops, it'd actually sound worse to you.

So uhm, let's just stick to Ogg Vorbis versus MIDI like I said originally. If you want the game to be somewhere on the order of 80 megabytes bigger but have nicer sound quality, Ogg Vorbis is your choice. If you're willing to settle for sound quality that isn't as good (but actually can sound pretty good if you install a good MIDI synthesizer on your computer like one that uses SoundFonts), in order to save disk space (and lots of it), well then go for MIDI.

Heh, maybe we could even offer BOTH options to people... so people who want nice sound can have an Ogg Vorbis version of the game, while people who want to save disk space can have a MIDI version of the game, and they'd be offered as separate downloads... naaah, I dunno about that idea, it seems too extreme, to have more than 1 version of the game, one that uses one audio format and one that uses a different audio format, that would mean we'd have to release 2 different editions for each version of the game. It would be a real pain to maintain 2 different versions of the game. Well I have figured out how I could implement the code so it would load Ogg Vorbis versions if they exist and if the right libraries for Ogg Vorbis are present, and use MIDI as a fallback. I could make that change to the code. Then the same code, and same compiled executable of the game would be able to work with either Ogg Vorbis or MIDI files depending on what is in the art directory. Hmm actually that's a pretty good idea, we don't have to make this an either-or, we can offer both options. Ah, I know, I'll change the poll to add that as an option to pick, and vote for it myself.

Oops... I was able to add the option but for some reason it looks like I can't change my vote on the poll. Oh well... I added the option to allow both formats, and then after I couldn't change my vote, I reset the vote counter to zero and I was able to re-vote again. Before I reset the counter there were 2 votes for Ogg Vorbis (me and someone else), and 0 votes for anything else. Now I've reset the counter to zero and changed my vote to "BOTH!". The other person who already voted can also re-vote if they want, now that the poll has an additional option. Unfortunately it looks like people won't be able to change their votes. If you vote one way but then change your mind and want to vote a different way you should post a comment below (luckily you can edit comments).

[Liberal Elitist]

I have implemented having the executable detect support both Ogg Vorbis and MIDI songs and use Ogg Vorbis songs if they are available and use MIDI songs as a fallback. Now I am finding Ogg Vorbis songs one by one for each of the public domain songs (and making sure they are either public domain or under some sort of license that allows them to be used like a Creative Commons license). I added a license file that lists all the licenses for each file and credits the necessary people (this is necessary to comply with attribution requirements in most of the Creative Commons licenses, but I also do it with the public domain Ogg music too, I am doing it with all the Ogg music).

So far I've got maybe a third or so of the Ogg music ready and at 64 kbps and the filesizes aren't THAT extreme. They are well within the predicted range, I'm not sure whether it'll end up coming out above or below 80 megabytes for all the Ogg music, but it seems my prediction on the filesize was fairly accurate. Also the sound quality really is quite nice, for most of these songs. I'm going to commit a new revision once I have Ogg Vorbis versions of all the music. It'll have both Ogg Vorbis and MIDI audio in the art directory. Then when you download the game you'll be able to pick which one you want (the one with .ogg files or the one with .mid files). Also along with enabling Ogg I'm also enabling FluidSynth, apparently it isn't loaded by default; this will only affect users on UNIX-based systems like Linux or FreeBSD who have FluidSynth, probably... I don't think the game uses it on Windows. But that will actually enable high-quality MIDI playback on UNIX-based systems for people who do have FluidSynth installed. I thought this was enabled by default in SDL2_mixer but apparently not, after looking at some API documentation and source code of the header files.

Anyway the point is we are well on the way to having both Ogg Vorbis and MIDI music available and having the user get to pick. This will make things even better for modders because you can use an .ogg file for better quality if you want or a .mid file to save disk space, with the same filename, and you only need one of them. Like for instance, basemode.ogg will play in base mode if you have it, and if you don't basemode.mid will play instead.

There is actually loads of public domain music out there. Did you know any music performed by the U.S. federal government or any agency of it is automatically a public domain performance? And Edison Records, which owned ALL of the original Edison phonographs' copyrights, donated all its intellectual property to the U.S. National Parks Service, which put it in the public domain. But those are all ancient recordings and most of them sound kinda bad. I am trying to prefer newer music. A lot of the newer music people release under Creative Commons licenses instead of making it public domain. So I just pick whatever sounds best and has a license that allows it to be used in the game (since if I preferred public domain over Creative Commons this would mean preferring some crappy-sounding music over nice-sounding music for a bunch of songs because public domain in many cases means really old performances from the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, or 1920s). Some of the music actually is really old public domain performances from a long time ago but it's, ya know, digitally restored and sounds good. There's also an odd license for some music, the EFF Open Audio License 1.0, but it's totally compatible with using in the game... it was made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation back in 2000 or 2001 or so but then became obsolete.

Anyway I'm making loads of progress on adding Ogg Vorbis music and it sounds great and it's all either public domain or under licenses that allow it to be distributed with a GNU GPL game, and I'm complying with all the licenses. Oh and according to Creative Commons, even if you have a no modifications license, it still allows you to convert a file from one format to another, so converting to a 64 kbps Ogg is actually allowed under any of the Creative Commons licenses. Also all of the .ogg files have full metadata to give credit to all the performers and composers and everyone, for attribution purposes to comply with the licenses. You'll notice that if you play them in any audio players... after I finish this and commit it to the SVN for everyone to use. I am using Audacity 2.0.5 for audio conversion and various other stuff and it is quite audacious and also free software as in freedom. Oh yeah and all the Ogg Vorbis files are 44100 Hz sample rate... files that are 22050 Hz sample rate sound like crap so I am staying away from that junk. And I get really high bitrate or lossless versions before re-encoding as Ogg Vorbis. I don't use the Ogg Vorbis versions they have on Wikipedia, those have already been re-encoded once, I go to the original sources and re-encode those instead for higher quality.

And for the songs that DO sound a little bad, 99% of that is because the original recordings are a bit bad and only 1% is because of encoding it as Ogg Vorbis at 64 kbps. So the main thing is, having a good original recording is the most important part, the format and bitrate you encode into isn't as important as having a high-quality original copy of the recording. Which means stuff from an Edison phonograph in the early 1900s will sound like crap no matter what and I'll avoid that stuff as much as possible (unlike Wikipedia, which uses a lot of that Edison phonograph stuff despite the lousy sound quality). So I'm going for newer recordings most of the time because they sound better. And recordings by the U.S. Army band, U.S. Marine band, U.S. Air Force band, I use those... plenty of good-sounding ones from them, and nothing they play is protected by copyright, meaning a fairly recent recording with high audio quality by them is public domain, plus those bands are pretty skilled musicians, too.

[seth--]

So far I've got maybe a third or so of the Ogg music ready and at 64 kbps and the filesizes aren't THAT extreme. They are well within the predicted range, I'm not sure whether it'll end up coming out above or below 80 megabytes for all the Ogg music, but it seems my prediction on the filesize was fairly accurate. Also the sound quality really is quite nice, for most of these songs. I'm going to commit a new revision once I have Ogg Vorbis versions of all the music. It'll have both Ogg Vorbis and MIDI audio in the art directory. Then when you download the game you'll be able to pick which one you want (the one with .ogg files or the one with .mid files).

Sounds good

Maybe it would be a nice to have separated folders inside art for midi, ogg, maps, etc. That way, making a the midi version for a new release is just deleting art/ogg/ and making the zip

[Liberal Elitist]

So far I've got maybe a third or so of the Ogg music ready and at 64 kbps and the filesizes aren't THAT extreme. They are well within the predicted range, I'm not sure whether it'll end up coming out above or below 80 megabytes for all the Ogg music, but it seems my prediction on the filesize was fairly accurate. Also the sound quality really is quite nice, for most of these songs. I'm going to commit a new revision once I have Ogg Vorbis versions of all the music. It'll have both Ogg Vorbis and MIDI audio in the art directory. Then when you download the game you'll be able to pick which one you want (the one with .ogg files or the one with .mid files).

Sounds good

Maybe it would be a nice to have separated folders inside art for midi, ogg, maps, etc. That way, making a the midi version for a new release is just deleting art/ogg/ and making the zip

Hadn't thought of that. Brilliant idea! Thanks, I think I'll do that. Right now I'm exactly half done. I've found public domain or Liberally licensed versions of 17 of the 34 songs and they are all ready to be committed and work with the game. The disk space seems to be just a wee bit lower than my prediction but very close, my disk space prediction of about 79 megabytes for the whole thing seems to be very close to what it's going to be.

So I'll need to not just move the files into subdirectories of /art called /art/ogg and /art/midi, but also change the source code and recompile it to look for the files in those locations. Shouldn't be too hard, I've done much bigger and more difficult changes than that in the past. But yea the game totally supports both Ogg Vorbis and MIDI in the version I'm working on now, I'm just not going to upload it until I've finished finding public domain or Liberally licensed recordings for every single song in the list. I've done some improvements to just a few of the recordings using Audacity 2.0.5 such as noise and click removal and some of the recordings that are older sound much much better if you add a little reverb, that little effect makes them sound like more recent recordings and like you're actually there in the room. But most of the recordings are unaltered... except for another thing I do which is removing leading and trailing silence, and also some of the recordings were parts of larger recordings that were much much larger so I had to delete all music before a certain point and after a certain point, like with my public domain recording of the opera Carmen I had to download the entire opera, find the one aria I was using, and delete everything before and after it and be very precise about which fraction of a second I would start and end at. And one of the performances had all this applause at the end and obviously I had to get rid of that, the area I deleted starts a few milliseconds before the first clap (and for some reason that recording had like 2 full minutes of applause in it, why the hell would anyone want to listen to applause, it's stupid, applause isn't music). A bunch of the songs have actual people singing words to music. On the downside, most of those aren't in English but other languages like French, German, Spanish, Italian, etc., so most people playing the game won't know what the words mean. But being multicultural and having multiple languages is Liberal, it's the Conservatives who want everyone to speak English. The recording I picked for La Cucaracha is by a traditional Mexican mariachi band and uses the lyrics that celebrate the Mexican revolution (the lyrics written by the Villists who supported Pancho Villa, a somewhat left-wing general with anti-authoritarian views who wanted to overthrow the government, sounds kinda like the Liberal Crime Squad to me). There were actually different factions that had their own lyrics, it would be even better to get the Zapatista lyrics by the supporters of Emiliano Zapata, those people were true Liberals and Mexico still has Zapatista revolutionaries in its southern poverty-stricken state of Chiapas even today. I'll see if I can get ahold of a public domain or Liberally licensed Zapatista version of the song to replace the Villist version of the song because Pancho Villa is insufficiently left-wing when compared to the Zapatistas.

Here is my working list of websites with free (as in freedom) music that I have compiled so far... this is where I've been getting my music recordings:
https://archive.org/
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/
http://freemusicarchive.org/
http://imslp.org/wiki/
http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/
http://www.musopen.org/
http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/the-recording-archives.htm
http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/public-domain-recordings.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

[Liberal Elitist]

I have finished it! Revision 842 adds support for Ogg Vorbis while keeping the existing MIDI support, and the MIDI files are in the /art/midi directory while the Ogg Vorbis files are in the /art/ogg directory, and I found songs for every single one of the 34 songs currently in use. Well that was a lot of work, I'm going to rest now. Anyway, now people can use either format, whichever they prefer... or use neither if they don't want music. Now everyone can be happy.

[Liberal Elitist]

Revision 843 improves the Ogg Vorbis music by replacing all the really old public domain recordings from the 1920s and 1930s (5 songs in total) with newer recordings of the same songs that sound better, all either public domain or under Creative Commons licenses. Two of the performances are quite unusual, a metal version of Ride of the Valkyries for cartheft.ogg and a blues version of the French national anthem for newscast.ogg (both from a new site for free-as-in-freedom music I discovered called Jamendo, so now the list of sites with free-as-in-freedom music is longer).

Revision 844, which is at the time I post this comment the current revision, adds a new file, /dev/national_anthem_lyrics.txt. The file is fairly self-explanatory, here, read it:

Code: [Select]

Liberal Crime Squad lyrics to the national anthem
by Rich McGrew

donated to the public domain under the CC0 license
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

If you can think of improvements to these lyrics that still fit the rhythm of the U.S.
national anthem you are welcome to contribute as long as you also keep your contributions
public domain, that makes things easier.

The purpose of this is to make a recording of the national anthem to these lyrics
(with good sound recording equipment and someone who has a nice voice), to use as
the victory song for the game. The original recording should be encoded as a lossless
FLAC, with 44100 Hz sample rate, while the version we bundle with the game itself
will be a low-bitrate Ogg Vorbis file (for people who download the Ogg Vorbis music
to use with the game). It is intended as a replacement for the current victory.ogg
(which is also the national anthem, but without LCS lyrics).


Oh say have you heard how our country was saved
By the Liberal Crime Squad's heroic endeavors?
They faced dangers galore, but prevailed in the end
When the people woke up, and united behind them.
Their Conservative foes, who had misruled this land,
Gave up in the end when they saw they were wrong.
Oh say does that star-spangled banner burn brightly
Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave?

The people of this land were once badly misled
And for quite a long time Liberals faced misfortune.
Racist, sexist bigots oppressed minorities
As a huge military killed innocent people.
Pollution fouled nature, animals were abused,
And the people could not openly air their views.
But then the Liberal Crime Squad came along and saved the day
Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Now our country's at peace, and our workers have rights,
And the moneyed interests no longer rule our nation.
Our elections are fair, and our laws are more just,
As we work together for a more perfect union.
But this cause is unfinished, there's more work to be done,
Though we know, in our hearts, that we've already won.
As our nation works together to solve its remaining problems,
Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
So if you're up to the challenge of singing this and recording it as a 44100 Hz FLAC and releasing it to the public domain for this project to use, please do so! And if you have to adjust the lyrics a bit to fit the rhythm of the national anthem better, go ahead, but I think the current lyrics fit the rhythm perfectly, I have sung the song to myself and the words fit the rhythm perfectly when I sing it to myself. This would make a great victory song for the game when players win! The Stalinized and Reaganized songs both have lyrics (and both are rather Orwellian sounding within the context of the game), but the regular lyrics to the national anthem don't quite fit with the theme of this game or with the LCS within the context of it being the song for when the LCS wins the game. I think these are lyrics that fit in with the game better.