Author Topic: Windows Welcome Music and the CISCO CallManager hold music  (Read 584 times)

Psyclon

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Windows Welcome Music and the CISCO CallManager hold music
« on: March 29, 2023, 03:30:22 PM »
After the inspiration of another thread, I thought I might put these two tracks here. They are both very well known actually, very famous even.

> Internet Explorer Start Kit (a.k.a. Windows Welcome Music) [1996] // New Age
[Upon registration/login to Soundcloud, the 80 MByte WAV can be downloaded]
soundcloud.com/stanlepard/1996-internet-starter-kit-velkommen-original-mix

This track is known as title.wma, that is how WindowsXP user found about the existance of that soothing new age track.
The track itself was comissioned by Microsoft in 1996 as background music for an infomercial disk about the Internet Explorer. When they put it into the WindowsXP setup, they "had it lying around", so they used it again. Stan LePard died a few years ago and was the creator of these tracks. I couldn't hear it until around 2008 because the sound drivers were not present from our clean installs and only on my first Acer laptop, when Acer had a customized installation with sound drivers in place before the XP setup, I noticed this great tune. I usually never skip it and I have kind of grown attached to it a bit emotionally. Titlte.wma is a downmixed mono 64 kBit/s, so grabbing the stereo WAV is a huge upgrade.

> Opus No.1 [1989] // New Age / Synth Pop
soundcloud.com/macodyyy/1989-cisco-callmanager-default-hold-music-opus-number-one-darrick-deel-tim-carleton

Darrick Deel and Tim Carleton recorded this track in their garage with a 4-track cassette recorder. Later, one of them would work for CISCO and when they needed a hold music, they used this track. The track can be bought on iTunes, but this is the "real" track as it's just from a compact cassette from the late 80s and if you let a gentle dehisser go over it (e.g. Audacity), you can have decent results.


The idea to put a small spotlight on these tracks comes from the other forum, but I thought: Why not? Just because I know and enjoy these tracks does not mean I can not spread it :D