Raven MIDI Pack

The Raven MIDI Pack is a music pack for Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders, released on 27 August 2020. It provides replacement for all duplicated tracks in the original game. The original tracks are still played but only in the first level where they occur; this leaves the first episode untouched and the second mostly unchanged, while the third is mostly new and the fourth, fifth, and sixth are entirely new. In addition, five extra bonus tracks that were not matched to any map slot are also included.

Although technically vanilla-compatible in that all tracks can be converted to MUS format and used in Heretic levels, the tracks from the pack will only be heard if played in a port that can read the EMAPINFO or ZMAPINFO lumps, or otherwise allows to map Heretic map slots to the corresponding lump if present, such as Crispy Heretic. This is because instead of having duplicated music lumps (like how registered Doom has D_E1M7, D_E2M5, and D_E3M5 all containing the same track), Heretic reuses the same lump (like the fourth episode of Ultimate Doom reuses tracks associated with levels from the first three episodes). Since this behavior is hardcoded, there is no way around this, short of splitting the pack into several episode-specific replacements.

The aim was to imitate Kevin Schilder's music style for Heretic, so that the pack would fit seamlessly and plausibly sound as if it were an original part of the game.

The project was initiated in April 2020 by James Paddock (Jimmy), who had previously organized similar collaborative MIDI packs for Plutonia, Revolution, and Rebirth. A "sequel" MIDI pack for Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel is under way.