Strange, I was sure I marked it solved as per the instructions on the main page.... Oh, well, try again....

Just FYI: title in main forum listing still says "[unsolved]" at the end... might want to remove the "un" to avoid confusion...

Ah, perfect. Bravo, yuval!

And that's all three. Thanks everyone!

The first one is the same Bourrée from English suite 2, played backwards.

The second one was found easily on Musipedia using the contour search ( UDDDUUDDDDUDDDD ):

http://www.musipedia.org/edit.html?&L=0&no_cache=1&tx_detedit_pi1[tid]=b0dd033cbe58aa5ea27747271bfd84e3

I must admit: I listened to only one of them. So I could well imagine that the others are recognizable too.
Let's remove the "solved" mark for now and see if anybody is willing to try the other ones...

(Sorry, was out of town for a while there.)

So, since I haven't had any responses on those other snippets, I'm guessing they're too mangled to be properly sourced. I'll mark this solved. Thanks for the help, much appreciated!

Actually, though the attached recordings have multiple voices, when I fed them into the recorder I filtered out all but one. Worked a few times, but still had some problems. But really, ham-handedly abusing a chiptune and hoping that an automated system would be able to make something of the result? Expecting perfection under those circumstances is asking far too much of it. As to why I didn't attempt humming? I like music but have never had much luck actually producing it.


Wow. I'd heard that one once before but never made any connection. Got quite the revamp in being converted! Impressive showing, and thanks for the info!

The microphone search is only meant to work if you sing, whistle, or play the melody on an instrument (monophonic), NOT for playing a polyphonic recording to Musipedia.

For identifying a polyphonic recording, one would need a completely different approach (Audio Fingerprinting, which is done, for example, by MusicDNS or Shazam). So, if you played the MP3s to Musipedia's microphone search, I would expect success only if they are monophonic (which they are not).

I listened to the last one, recognized the following melody:

 
 search Musipedia for this

and found it in Musipedia: http://www.musipedia.org/edit.html?&no_cache=1&tx_detedit_pi1[tid]=7c82fab8c8f89124e2ce92984e04fb40

On the one hand, you might think it is a disadvantage to have to recognize the melody yourself and somehow enter it into Musipedia. On the other hand, with Shazam or MusicDNS, you would be completely out of luck in this case because their database contains only commercial recordings, not recordings of old computer games. With the Musipedia approach, you can at least still find it based on solely the melody, even if you have to do some singing or typing.

Specifically, from the Commodore 64 game "Dante's Inferno".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnsWceYWNpQ

The arranger (Fred Gray) once said in an interview that "I used Bach, and played some tunes forward and again backwards to save memory." but he didn't identify the songs. (He also didn't stay exclusively with Bach - the final piece is obviously "Joy to the World".) So I'm left with a bunch of music I like and would like to hear the originals of, except maybe it's not all Bach, and maybe some of it is being played backwards! (At least, unlike some C64 games, it doesn't appear to be at the mercy of the continent it's running on to determine tempo.)

I've tried before to track down the pieces but have had limited success. The only one I found is the one played between Acheron (0:35 in the above video) and Dis (2:27), the Bourrée from "Overture in Bm", BWV 831.

I've tried Musipedia's automated features, and I sometimes get back results, but not the right ones. Might just be me, no idea. Tried slowing things down, etc. No luck.

For one-minute MP3s captured from the original code:
http://s91291220.onlinehome.us/hosted/Dante/dantes_inferno - track 1.mp3 (Unused in the game?)
http://s91291220.onlinehome.us/hosted/Dante/dantes_inferno - track 6.mp3 (The Dark Wood)
http://s91291220.onlinehome.us/hosted/Dante/dantes_inferno - track 8.mp3 (Upper Hell - BWV 831, included here for completeness)
http://s91291220.onlinehome.us/hosted/Dante/dantes_inferno - track 2.mp3 (Lower Hell/Dis)

I can post the whole of any given track from the game if need be. If someone wishes to have it posted as the playback widget for this site, I can try feeding it through the mic, but playing it at normal speed with two discrete instruments isn't going to come out well.