Pre-existing available Playdate music?

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I have a musician I usually work with on my games who will, eventually be making music for the game I'm working on. But he's too busy at the moment to focus on what is essentially a hobbyist project.

So I'm hoping to just find some appropriate stand-in music in the mean time and then patch his soundtrack in later.

The question one: is there anyone out there making music assets specifically for the Playdate? Either paid or royalty free? Thinking like the same way you can just buy/get pixel art from artists on itch.io. Are there music equivalents out there?

Don't want to ask someone to make custom music if I'm going to replace it in the future, but if someone out there just has been making music for people to use in Playdate games, would love to hear about them.

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well, to use the onboard synths you've got to do a lot of heavy lifting to get full-sounding songs to come through.

using mp3s is more easily doable but then you're not limited to the playdate in any way (except for the speaker frequency response range), and there should be plenty of those free-floating around the internet. There's no playdate-oriented mp3 libraries that I'm aware of.

Ultimately I would decide how your composer will be getting you the music, and try to code something as similar to that as you can. Meaning, if they plan on giving you mp3s, then code so that it will be easy to just change the file path and switch to their music. With midi this would be a little more challenging, but you can still set up the synths and effects in a way that's malleable and can take generic midi.

You want to waste as little work as possible.

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I'm curious what "music assets specifically for the Playdate" would encompass? Sort of the equivalent of Kevin MacLeod, but specific to the console?

I'll second @DJ_irl's comment that the most important thing to determine is how your chosen composer plans to deliver the files (when available) and how you plan to implement them.

There are plenty of places to find royalty-free music you can use as placeholder, as mp3 or mid, and often with filters to fit a specific genre or vibe.

For our project, I've been using multi-track MIDI with short PCM wav samples and it's provided a full polyphonic sound with a lot of control over playback and not a ton of code required.

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Thanks both! Really just meant like how there's plenty of creators on itch who are like "Here's my Pico-8 tilemap" or "Here's my Playdate font" or "Here's my Bitsy sprites" was just curious if there were folk out there doing the same for music designed specifically to sound not-terrible on the Playdate's basic, tinny mono speaker.

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Teenage Engineering worked on the audio components. They're pros; it sounds pretty good with everything I've thrown at it so far. Obviously it lacks bass but as far as a handheld console, it might have the best audio specs out there.

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There are some good royalty free sources out there.

So many that it's a bit of an overload.

The best I've found are Japanese, one such library is FREE BGM (music materials) free download｜DOVA-SYNDROME

I use only royalty free Japanese music in my games these days. I never could afford to pay a musician! Notable exception being YOYOZO music which I did pay a friend for, as I needed somebody to write it in Pulp.

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Sorry for the slow reply, but thanks so much for these leads! Really appreciate it.

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I’m not sure if the licensing allows these tracks to be used in games, but it might be worth getting in touch with the artists to ask about that or see if they have any other music available to use.

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