Video Game Music: Ordering and Sub-Soundtracks

MusicBrainz
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The Super Smash Bros. video game series is known for its expansive soundtrack. This has resulted in some practical issues for maintaining metadata, as well as reopening questions about fitting the metadata to the MBZ schema.

This thread should serve as a place to discuss style guidelines for editors who interact with VGM.

Ordering

Consider the soundtrack for the first game. Soundtrack works have work-work relationships to their constituent songs. Primarily, these use the “part of” and “included in” relationships (discussion of that is important, but perhaps should happen in another thread). These relationships can be given a specific order. Currently, this soundtrack has its tracks ordered by appearance in the Soundtest of the game.

Games sometimes contain Soundtests where you can test/listen to the music present in the game. Outside of Soundtests, games essentially never have an “order” for their songs. Except for very simple games, you won’t hear the music in a set order, and releases of the soundtrack tend to change their order.

So, these Soundtests may be the only source of an order for a soundtrack. The question is: would it make sense to use this order for the Soundtrack in MusicBrainz? Further, what about other cases were the order is given.

It might not even make sense for works on Soundtracks to have an order. Is it giving any useful information?

Sub-Soundtracks

Consider the soundtrack for the latest game in the series, Ultimate. For this game’s Soundtest, the tracks are not only ordered, but organized by what game that track originates from. Currently, this Soundtrack has a set of 39 Soundtrack works connected via a “parts” work-work relationship.

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For the sake of discussion, we’ve been calling them “subsoundtracks or sub-soundtracks.”

Strictly speaking, it seems this is an error. The works connected to those sub-soundtracks “should” be connected to the central Soundtrack work. However, this was done for practicality reasons.

Ultimate contains over 1,000 works (not even including the litany of jingles). If they were all directly connected to the central Soundtrack, it would be a nightmare. Not only in entering the data (imagine trying to keep track of 1,000+ works as you enter them), but also accessing the data (VGM tends to have several names for each song, so finding the work you’re going for would be a journey).

It’s a trade between practicality and accuracy.

Also, the sub-soundtracks are ordered, and the tracks therein are ordered as well.

Notes

Firstly, some of this conversation has happened on the unofficial Discord guild. Tagging @UltimateRiff and @jayylmao here.

Sub-soundtracks may also be useful for DLC soundtracks, which often have their own music separate from the main game.

Some games also release new music over updates. My mind goes to the Stardrew Valley or corru.observer soundtracks, which release new music for every major update. These Soundtracks could be organized by Sub-soundtrack, each one corresponding to an update.

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tagging in @aerozol and @CyberSkull, as I know they do a lot of VGM work too

also adding some specific examples with links (all of these include new music):

  • SimCity 4, which has the base game and one expansion, as well as a Deluxe Edition which includes both of the above
  • Super Smash Bros Ultimate, which has several DLC characters (each of which come with a map and other bonus content), which can be purchased individually or in a couple bundles (I think with bonus content in the latter)
  • Minecraft, which has had several major updates over the years, some adding new music, some taking music out of the game, I think (I wouldn’t argue for removing works from a soundtrack tho, as this is a historic database)
  • Sonic Mega Collection, a collection of many previously released Sonic games, and it includes new music for the menus to access the games within. would be a candidate for sub-works, I believe, since it includes preexisting games
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Four Swords, a combo game which includes the earlier Link to the Past (with little modification, I’d imagine none to the music) and the new multiplayer game Four Swords, the latter with a limited release with new content

I mentioned it on the Discord, but I don’t think the current use of subworks is correct for Super Smash Bros Ultimate (and some others in the series), and if they’re ordered, it should probably follow the order in the All tracks menu in the sound test (that said, I think I’ll leave it as is until I start working through the Ultimate soundtrack, it’ll help me keep track of where I’m at, lol)

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in theory, the games that include other games (like the Sonic and Zelda examples) could simply have an Includes relationship to the original games’ soundtracks, since it simply includes the whole game, but I would like input from others before putting in such edits, lol

(actually, Super Smash Bros Brawl included demos for some of the games the characters are from, someone even speedran Ocarina of Time within Brawl in the 5 minute time limit, lol)

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Hi! first of all everyone should congratulate me cause i finally figured out how to make a post here! :> (its not an issue of website clarity really i’ve just never been posting on a forum before)

Anyway I do think the subsoundtracking of smash bros is like just correct after some thought. Like, MB is a database for like people to read, so it feels very reasonable to have a way of organizing this situation in a way that is accessible and readable for anyone, even if the particular sound test situation for that wasnt the case. Mirroring the officially decided way of organizing by source games seems pretty good to me in the aim of readability. Also like, I haven’t tried using one myself, but i imagine screen readers for example would perhaps struggle with a 1k+ list, compared to like the aforementioned subsoundtracking. And on ordering specifically I think it’s reasonable to go by the sections from sound test too, moreso than the default of alphabetical.

As for other, less auditorially expansive games, I’m kinda mixed. On one hand in the case of minecraft, the updates are each their own release worth of music, so thats further proof for it. Generally i’ve seen that second release thing happen often with updates for larger game projects like that.

Also this serves as a good way of connecting any currently disparate soundtrack works for segments of the same video game. (idk if any exist but like its a bigass database with a lotta ppl doin shit, gotta be somewhere lmao.)

Otherhanding it tho, i also feel like there’s some value in having a page that’s like “here is every single song that can be heard in this videogame.” Not sure if there’s enough value to discard this pretty good system proposed here for works, but like maybe a series would be good for that.

I do know one other game series that could probably benefit from subsoundtracking, being “splatoon”. it’s also a series of pretty expansive soundtracks, the latest game having around 200 tracks. Nintendo did set up a streaming music app, and while limited in game choice, it does have arguably* all the music in the splatoon games. On there, the music is sorted like:

  • Game
    • DLC
    • Mode 1
    • Mode 2
    • Mode 3

ya get what i mean, and heres an example pic if ya don’t: https://i.postimg.cc/ryfqQH6N/Screenshot-20260429-081646-Nintendo-Music.jpg

So in the interest of following a source, subsoundtracking could be used for this game series as well, though i do feel that personally it wouldn’t feel quite right to splut them this tightly, for reasons i can’t really verbalise other than “the vibes”. (also currently in the db there isnt even a work for 2/3rds of the series but discussion is good for when someone does get to that meddlesome priest).

*only arguably because theres some shorter songs and jingles or sound effects that aren’t hosted on there but sure do exist.

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ordering vgm does have issues too, like if the DLC tracks get mixed in with the non-DLC tracks (i.e. they get slotted in at position 3 of a list of 20 in the menu, for instance), or they’re directly included from another game, which takes them out of the “part of” ordering (been having this specific issue with the Smash Bros Brawl soundtrack, since it includes recordings from Melee, the previous game)

actually, you mentioned series, perhaps we could use those if we want to capture the order of a sound test menu? instead of trying to fit it into works, that is. it would at least take care of the Part of/Included in split mentioned above. I don’t know that I’d personally do much editing like this, as I think creating soundtrack works is prolly more important (and I enjoy doing them too), but I don’t think I’d be against doing this either

on that Nintendo Music example, I’m not sure if those playlists are really in the scope of MusicBrainz… we have these entered by game as soundtrack releases, for instance like this, but since some of the playlists can change at any time (like playlists for series or characters), I think that might be controversial, at least (see previous forum discussions here and there)

the jingles and sound effects should probably be a part of the soundtrack work too, since they are often musical, can be used in music, and are part of the game. this is another reason I’m a bit hesitant to use sub-soundtrack works, since (at least while editing the Smash Bros series) those are often excluded from the sound test menu (or in a seperate menu just for sounds, in the case of some games)