The album art for Minecraft - Volume Beta
Minecraft - Volume Beta is the second soundtrack for Minecraft by C418, the first being Minecraft - Volume Alpha. It was released on November 9, 2013 on C418's website at Bandcamp and on the Apple Music, with a release later on Spotify.
The album includes 30 songs for a total length of nearly 141 minutes. It features many music tracks which were added to Minecraft "silently" in the Music Update, as well as the music discs that were missing from the first album and a few tracks that are not in the game.
Listen it on:
Official description
The second official soundtrack of Minecraft. 140 minutes in length and extremely varied. Featuring the all-new creative mode, menu tunes, the horrors of the nether, the end's odd and misleading soothing ambiance and all the missing record discs from the game!
It's my longest album ever, and I hope you'll love the amount of work I crammed into it.[1]
Track listing
| No. | Title | Name in Minecraft | Length | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Ki | 1:32 | This is a reprise (a similar but slightly different version) of Key from Minecraft - Volume Alpha (note that both have the same pronunciation). It starts off with Key but includes more electronic music. | ||
| 2. | Alpha | credits.ogg | 10:03 | This track is a reprise of some tracks from Minecraft - Volume Alpha, including Minecraft, Mice on Venus, Moog City, and Sweden. It plays during the End Poem, after defeating the Ender dragon. | This is the first of two longer songs which are "Album Only" on the iTunes online store. |
| 3. | Dead Voxel | nether2.ogg | 4:56 | It begins with ambient music and distant, high-pitched sounds similar to ones heard in Ballad of the Cats and later turns into a serene but dramatic piano song. It is a less dissonant, more somber variant of Concrete Halls. At the end, part of Beginning can be heard. | This, along with Concrete Halls and The End, was present in Console Edition as of TU9. |
| 4. | Blind Spots | creative2.ogg | 5:32 | Starts off primarily featuring a major seven chord, and later introduces darker minor chords. The entire track is dominated by a repeated quarter note rhythm. | |
| 5. | Flake | 2:50 | This song starts with a calm, bell-like synth and ambient sounds and later a glitchy rhythm enters. | This track is used in the Console Edition Festive Mash-Up Pack. | |
| 6. | Moog City 2 | menu2.ogg[Java and Bedrock editions only] | 3:00 | This track is a reprise of Moog City from Minecraft - Volume Alpha. | |
| 7. | Concrete Halls | nether1.ogg | 4:14 | This track is a rhythmic song with dark, relatively dissonant ambient music, heavily reverbed percussion, and distant ghast sounds. | This track, along with Dead Voxel and The End, was also present in Console Edition as of TU9. |
| 8. | Biome Fest | creative1.ogg | 6:18 | It starts with a song of synthesized voices which makes way to an electronic song with bells in the background. | This track was previously used in a video by Notch to demonstrate biomes.[2] |
| 9. | Mutation | menu1.ogg | 3:05 | This track is a variation on Minecraft from Minecraft - Volume Alpha with string ensemble embellishments (this is likely where the name Mutation originated). | |
| 10. | Haunt Muskie | creative3.ogg | 6:01 | An upbeat, ambient, rhythmic track. It begins with the growing sound of echoing chimes and clarinets that quicken in pace. A reversed piano, accompanied by a synthesized accordion or similar instrument, begin to play up and down a scale, shortly before echoing and fading away, after which the main portion of the song starts. A saxophone can be heard in the background throughout most of the piece. | The title is an anagram of the virtual singing character, Hatsune Miku.[3] |
| 11. | Warmth | nether3.ogg | 3:59 | The song starts with loud, hollow sounds of something banging on a metallic object, which fades into synthesizer music with enderman-like sounds. Near the end, the music turns back into banging sounds, but louder and less muted. At the end are sounds of a large amount of a water-like liquid flowing. | |
| 12. | Floating Trees | menu4.ogg | 4:04 | It is an ethereal and calming track in which times of rain(?) can be heard. It is written in the same key as Minecraft. The end seems to contain the start of the melody from Subwoofer Lullaby. | This appears to be a reference to the well-known annoyance of leaving a tree only partially chopped down, thus leaving it “floating”. |
| 13. | Aria Math | creative4.ogg | 5:10 | It has a main theme played in hang drums throughout the song with electronic music to accompany it. Later the main theme turns into guitar accompanied by a crescendo played in orchestral strings near the end. | Aria is a music term for a song of air. |
| 14. | Kyoto | 4:09 | A downtempo song in two main parts. The first part features a piano playing the bass part, with a melody and countermelody in saxophone and flute, respectively. The second part features synthesized strings and celesta. | Kyoto is a Japanese city and was formerly the imperial capital of Japan. This track was also used in the festive mash-up pack for the console edition. | |
| 15. | Ballad of the Cats | nether4.ogg | 4:35 | A period of techno-sounding music and then a break. Later a second period of peaceful music and then a techno-style ending. Near the beginning and end are distant, echoing screams (likely Ghast sounds). | |
| 16. | Taswell | creative6.ogg | 8:35 | It starts off as a track of echoing, ethereal music and high-pitched beeping with odd static-like periods in between. It suddenly becomes an upbeat, catchy song with steady drum beats. Later it turns into an electronic track with the middle song in the background. It starts playing quieter static-like periods at the end. | This track's title is a reference to the late Ryan Davis of Giant Bomb. |
| 17. | Beginning 2 | menu3.ogg | 2:56 | This track is a reprise of Beginning from Minecraft - Volume Alpha. | |
| 18. | Dreiton | creative5.ogg | 8:17 | An ambient track that makes use of hang drum sounds. It is a slow rhythm that slowly loudens, and then suddenly quiets down again, slowly crescendoing until dramatically quieting into a guitar piece. | „Dreiton“ is German for “three tone” and may be a reference to C418's earlier album, zweitonegoismus ("two tone egoism"), which itself may be a reference to an even earlier album, "Sine" (description: eins- "one" in German.) |
| 19. | The End | end.ogg | 15:04 | After a loop of part of the track Minecraft succumbs to excessive reverb and glitching, a low-pitched drone starts and grows slowly, eventually gaining a harmony of choir voices. At the climax of this piece, a pulsing, one-note ostinato appears and is overlaid with a half-tempo rendition of the song Sweden. Throughout the track, extremely distorted or remixed versions of the tracks Dry Hands, Wet Hands, Danny, Oxygène, Equinoxe, Subwoofer Lullaby, Beginning, Cat, and Haggstrom from Minecraft - Volume Alpha can be heard. Floating Trees from Minecraft - Volume Beta can also be heard. | This is the second of two longer songs which are "Album Only" on the iTunes online store. The track was already present in Console Edition as of TU9, along with Dead Voxel and Concrete Halls. |
| 20. | Chirp | chirp.ogg | 3:07 | An upbeat retro tune with a low-fi production feel and a sample from a 1970 MATTEL Program Disc: Bossa Nova Style playing in the background.[citation needed] | From this track until Far (track 29) are all music discs available in the game excluding Cat and Thirteen, and with the exception of Eleven being an exclusive music track. |
| 21. | Wait | wait.ogg | 3:54 | An upbeat jazzy, techno track. | This track was originally titled Where are we now and for a long time was in the record folder but was not added as a music disc due to issues with the spaces in its name. This was finally rectified by renaming it and it was added as a music disc. |
| 22. | Mellohi | mellohi.ogg | 1:38 | A slow, slightly melancholic waltz. | |
| 23. | Stal | stal.ogg | 2:32 | A moderate jazz-like piece with a recorder. | |
| 24. | Strad | strad.ogg | 3:08 | A tropical-sounding synth piece. | |
| 25. | Eleven | 1:11 | A slow, calm piano piece. At the beginning, the record static from the start of the music disc 11 can be heard, but is abruptly switched to the new tune when a record scratching sound interrupts it. | This track references the music disc 11 in its name and length, but features a new track instead of the disturbing sound of a person running away from some unknown creature. | |
| 26. | Ward | ward.ogg | 4:10 | The song starts off with an excerpt from Chopin's Funeral March played on a synth organ but is interrupted before it goes into an electronic, upbeat, exploration/adventure-themed tune with a dark undertone. | The old-sounding intro to this song is shortened in Volume Beta, compared to the in-game music disc version. |
| 27. | Mall | mall.ogg | 3:18 | A calm piece of serene music. | |
| 28. | Blocks | blocks.ogg | 5:43 | An upbeat melody with a shuffling rhythm. | |
| 29. | Far | far.ogg | 3:12 | A calm, relaxing, nature-like melody. | |
| 30. | Intro | 4:36 | This track consists of a person (likely C418 himself) humming and playing notes on a piano, as if compiling a song from their head. Strings, along with echoing synthesized sounds and other recordings of what may be the same voice, fade in afterwards, until the song ends. | On C418's website there is a description for this song: “See you next time”. |
Total running time: approximately 141 minutes.