Pinkie's Parasprite Parade - Release Notes

These notes are rather long, so click after the break to read them!


Source music is generally very difficult to work with when extracting it from a film or TV series. Sometimes it's only heard for a few seconds if a fictional character is listening to it through the radio, for instance, and is thus incomplete. Often it's not mixed and mastered into media the same way traditional background music or a film score would, resulting in undesirable audio quality, volume fluctuations, and drop-outs.

Pinkie's Parasprite Parade is an exception to the norm where, instead of the source music serving as a distraction or background element, it becomes a plot device as well as the primary focus of the characters; it runs nearly three minutes and also performs nearly three complete loops in its main melody. It's also happened to become one of the most popular pieces of incidental music from the show alongside the Cutie Mark Crusaders montage (featured prominently in The Show Stoppers, though also used as party source music in Call of the Cutie and Party of One).

Even though this piece of music has generated a large following, with countless remixes and redone versions created by fans, the original recording is still source music and is utilized as such in the final cut of the episode. The music and its volume levels fluctuates through the left, right, and center channels as Pinkie Pie moves across the screen, and there are drop-outs and sudden musical switches between channels as shots change. Sound effects are also a given here - primarily in the center channel where the majority of the sound effects and dialog are mixed for the iTunes releases.

It is impossible to fix these problems in order to present this music *exactly* as heard in the episode, minus the volume fluctuations and drop-outs, dialog and sfx-free. Here is what I opted to do instead:

For the actual video, I pulled out the front surround (left and right) and center audio channels, muted as much of the sound effects and dialog as possible, and mixed it into stereo. The first minute and 18 seconds presents the music as you hear it in the episode; the remainder of the track (as Twilight is talking with Celestia) originally had the music playing from only the right channel. I took the right channel and pasted it into the left to create a "mono" sound that balances the audio in the center. I did this because, to be frank... I don't think anyone wants to listen to a minute and a half of music coming out of only the right speaker. I certainly don't.

For the mp3/flac download, I "created" a brand new mono track using only the front right channel. The majority of it was constructed from 1:18 to 2:04 in the video; it just happened to be dumb luck that the music goes through one complete loop in *only* the right channel. The previous rip of PPP (done by ToastyJustice on YouTube) was sourced using the back surround channels and encoded in stereo. I normally consider the back channels to not sound as crisp as the front channels do; unfortunately, there was hardly any audio data in the front left channel as there was in the back left channel. This resulted in a choice between using the back channels with inferior quality in stereo, or the front right channel with better quality in mono. I ultimately went with the latter, as I care more for quality regardless of whether or not something is encoded in stereo or mono.

The only unique parts of this music not featured in the download are two extra cymbal hits at 1:00 and 2:22 in the video.

Anyway, I've rambled on long enough. Enjoy Pinkie's Parasprite Parade.