I’ve remastered the entire Marathon Infinity sounds file. The most obviously noticeable changes are that many sounds are much less distorted (with the side effect of being roughly half as loud as the originals – adjust your game/system volume as needed), and sounds will feature approximations of upper frequencies that were missing on the originals. Many sounds that were originally 8-bit (a good example is the “got item” sound) will also be much less noisy. Detailed information on the changes is included as a .pdf with the download.

This works with any Aleph One scenario that uses vanilla Infinity sounds. It also works with Marathon 2 on Aleph One - it probably won’t work with the vanilla Marathon 2 apps for either Windows or Mac. If you really need a version of these for vanilla Marathon 2, ask me nicely and I may consider making one (though because I’m in the process of remixing many of these directly from the CD-quality sources, I may not bother until I’m done with that).

Important: ALEPH ONE VERSIONS BEFORE 1.3.0 REQUIRE YOU TO RESTART THE GAME AFTER SELECTING THESE SOUNDS. (Bold and caps so you don’t miss it.) On the plus side, you’ll only have to do this once (unless you move back to the defaults for whatever reason). And you should really upgrade to 1.3.1 or 1.4pre2 – it’s generally a bad idea to run old software, and you can no longer even gather or join net games with releases prior to 1.3.0.

Finally uploading a new version, primarily because I’d mixed up the “S’pht Door Closing” and “S’pht Door Opening” sounds. This is because the sounds file itself had them mixed up in the 8-bit sounds slot, which was what I was using to check that I’d uploaded the right versions of everything; and also because ShapeFusion also has them mixed up. (I’m supposing Anvil may also have mixed them up, but I haven’t checked.) In any case, the game seems to want them where the vanilla file has them in the 16-bit slots, so anyone else who wants to make new versions of the sounds should take note: The “S’pht Door Opening” and “S’pht Door Closing” sounds are mislabelled in ShapeFusion. (The mislabelling may also be true of the Pfhor Door sounds; I’d advise double-checking. However, I did not mix those up, because the 8-bit and 16-bit sounds for those are in the same slot.)

The other major change is that I have moved all of the sounds to the 8-bit slot rather than the 16-bit slot. These sounds are all 16-bit, but on the whole, the game doesn’t care one way or the other; it will still play them as 16-bit sounds. Note that, on old versions of Aleph One, you’ll need to restart the game after selecting these sounds. On the plus side, you will only need to do this once (unless you go back to the default sounds for whatever reason). This was due to a caching bug that was fixed in 1.3, so if you’re running an old version of Aleph One, you should upgrade to 1.3.1 or 1.4pre2. The advantage to moving them to the 8-bit slot is that if you accidentally select 8-bit sounds, you will no longer hear silence. Everything will sound really bad, but at least you’ll hear something!

(Note that I wrote the readme file to this version before the caching bug was fixed, so it won’t reflect that this step is no longer necessary in recent versions of Aleph One. I don’t feel it’s worth rereleasing the sounds purely to update the readme, particularly since I’ve by now remixed many of them directly from the CD-quality sources – expect a major new release sometime in 2021.)

I may also have revised a few of these sounds since 1.0. I didn’t keep detailed notes, so I have no idea what I changed.

Should you have any questions, you can contact me on the Pfhorums (same username as here), reddit (/u/aaronnotarobot), or Discord (Aaron#6608; you will need to be a member of the subreddit Discord – or some other Discord I’m in – to contact me). Enjoy!