Links

This is a collection of my favorite sites on the internet and other resources you may find useful. If any of these links appear to be broken or outdated, please contact me! If you have a VGM related site on an independant platform like Neocities, I'd love to hear from you.

Disclaimer

I'm not paid to promote anything here nor do I financially benefit from the clicks. Recommended services and software are all free and most are open source. Most links are secure HTTPS (wiki) but a few are HTTP only. Stay safe on the web!

Musician Friends

Ailsean: Website of Ailsean, a great guitarist and video game cover artist.

Eric's Little Shack: Eric is one of the most old school artists in the VG cover scene, and he makes some pretty legit covers. Performs all instruments live. Classic stuff.

Jason Vincion: Awesome musician that makes some pretty sweet ambient metal stuff. He's very consistent with his releases and has a lot of great material, so check him out!

Metroid Metal: A very stellar band started by Stemage. Some exceptional material here, so be sure not to miss out!

Minibosses: One of the oldest video game cover bands, still playing shows. These guys helped build the scene into what it is today. Seen em play so many times now and it's always awesome!!!

Norrin Radd: One of the best chiptune artists out there. Writes very melodic stuff. You'll want to check him out for sure.

Video Game Covers

Dwelling of Duels: Monthly VGM cover competition that has themes each month. You're required to have at least one live instrument. Been around for a long time and I submitted regularly in the early years. This is a goldmine for good music (especially in 2005), so check it out!

OCRemix.org: Over 25 years old now, more electronica focused remixes than live music, but there's some good stuff here. I have one release on this site.

Video Game Music

Project 2612: Largest archive online for Genesis music. So many funky fresh Genesis soundtracks. Get set up and jam out!

SNESMusic.org: Largest archive online for Super Nintendo music. So many great soundtracks, so little time!

Zophar's Domain: Old school site for getting VGM and related plugins, still kicking. I'm not a fan of the way the site navigates or names their files, but it will probably survive any other VGM resource I link to, so check it out for other console music.

Archives

Chromelodeon: One of the greatest bands ever that will be sorely missed. The guitarist Edward Tsang is one of my best friends. I have many fond memories seeing them live.

Concatenation Records: Concatenation Records was a netlabel dedicated to releasing experimental music, chiptunes, and video game covers. All of the artists on this label are affiliated with The Shizz in some way, shape, or form and can be found conversing on those forums.

Housethegrate: My brother's old website. His covers are much better than mine.

SnappleMan: An amazing musician and one of my best friends. We've collaborated a lot and he's the guy that's always encouraged me to stay in the scene. He makes the most balls-out metal VG covers, they're awesome.

VGMix: OG VG cover site from 2002-2006. Check it out for a glimpse into the scene from the early era. Some of my first music was released here. This is the most recent archive I could find before it went down in early 2006.

virt: If you don't know who Jake Kaufman aka virt is, do yourself a favor and check him out. You won't regret it. Founder of VGMix.

XOC: Multi-talented musician who does VG covers with a WIDE variety of live instruments. His Super Mario World album has always been one of my favorites. Go check him out!

Blogs

Nitouhei's Game Music Blog: Blog by Nitouhei who follows the VGM cover scene from around the world. [Japanese site]

Good Nintentions Gone Bad: Another VGM cover blog by 778. [Japanese site]

Software

Audacity: I wouldn't recommend this as a DAW, but for general sound editing and conversion it's simple and effective.

Cakewalk: Originally created by Roland and was one of the first MIDI sequencers. For a free DAW your best options are this or Reaper. The built-in effects plugins are super good.

mp3DirectCut: Lossless editing for mp3s. I needed to find a tool that could do basic editing on an mp3 file without re-encoding. This is lightweight and fits the bill.

Reaper: If you're looking for a free DAW to make music this is probably what you want, even though I prefer Cakewalk.

RetroArch: The one retro gaming emulator to rule them all. Setting it up can be tricky and time consuming, but so worth it. Available on literally every platform, even some consoles.

Soulseek: I don't condone piracy, but Soulseek is a great way to find lots of legal music and obscure VGM that otherwise can't be found online. I still see some of my old mp3s floating around here!

uBlock Origin: Free and open source ad blocker, and the only one that seems to stay ahead of the curve. You can customize it by disabling Javascript for certain sites or manually removing other intrusive elements for a clean browsing experience.

VLC media player: I prefer Winamp/WACUP for audio, but for local video files I've always used this. You probably already know about it, but hey.

WACUP: I used Winamp for over 20 years, but I finally found a worthy successor. It's basically the same thing but gets updates and works better on Windows 11. If you want a free VGM player without ads, this is it. Who doesn't love Milkdrop visualizer?

Miscellaneous

Archive.org: Obviously great for checking out websites that are no longer around like the Archived section above, but it's also good for downloading all sorts of abandonware games.

EGGRAMEN: Excellent resource for free CSS templates and web design advice. I've learned a lot here and is how I built most of this site.

Fightcade: Best way to play arcade games online.

Neocities: This site wouldn't be here without them, so credit where credit is due. If you're old enough to remember Geocities, my first site there was published in 1997. Web 1.0 is how I remember the internet so static HTML sites are my favorite. Go make a Neocities site, it's free!

Privacy Guides: If you need to learn about this kind of data security stuff this is my favorite resource.

Proton: Privacy respecting services for e-mail and cloud storage. I'd highly recommend ditching Google for this. All of the media on this site is hosted by a free 5GB Proton Drive account.

The Cutting Room Floor: Deep video game lore for when you're bored. I like to learn about regional differences between games.

TheShizz.org: The coolest VGM forums on the internet where I've been a member since 2003!

VGMdb.net: Probably the most comprehensive database online for video game music composers and OST releases. I just wish they had an RSS feed.