Bubble Trouble’s high-quality music
Does this sound familiar to you?
That’s the full version of “Coconut Island” by Matt Swoboda. You may know it better as this shorter version, which is the version used as the alternate level-set-1 background music in the original Bubble Trouble.
Curiously, the Mac OS X version of Bubble Trouble omits that music, although it does include the four other music tracks as ‘snd ‘ resources. All five tracks originally came as MAD files; here’s an archive of the MAD files, rescued from the original Bubble Trouble’s Mac-OS-only installer, for your listening/converting pleasure.
Among the five tracks are two others by Swoboda, composed specifically for Bubble Trouble. The other two are by Yannis Brown. The full song list is:
- Level set 1: “Bongalonga” by Brown
- Level set 1 (alternate): “Coconut Island” (Bubble Trouble edit) by Swoboda
- Level set 2: Composed specifically for Bubble Trouble by Swoboda
- Level set 3: “Chunga-babe!” by Brown
- Level set 4: Composed specifically for Bubble Trouble by Swoboda
You’ll need PlayerPRO to play or convert the MAD files; Vox, which I normally use to play and convert modules, does not support MAD. Also, you may find that PlayerPRO doesn’t work under Mac OS X; I used 5.10.0rc2, and it did nothing but crash when I tried to load a module file. (UPDATE: It’s mostly fixed in trunk@r110—no crash, but oversampling now distorts the audio.) I had to run 5.9.8 under SheepShaver (which is also how I installed the original Bubble Trouble, which is otherwise locked away in that Mac OS installer).
Enjoy.
March 24th, 2010 at 00:31:48
Fantastic. Hooray for retro gaming.
Have to find the music for Digger now…
April 5th, 2010 at 13:58:50
There used to be a file containing the music of all Ambrosia Software games (yes, distributed by Ambrosia!) in mp3 format, but I can’t find it right now. Worse yet, their ftp site does not seem to be online anymore – that’s a shame.
I have all these music in my iTunes library. You could say I’m a bit obsessed with game music, and that of Ambrosia among them – for instance, some time ago I managed to extract the music from Harry into a readable format, and posted them.
October 5th, 2026 at 02:57:18
Hi Peter. I’m putting together a version of Bubble Trouble that runs on Apple Silicone and is faithful to the 1.0.1 version, including authentic performances of the original MAD files (the Bubble Trouble X .wav files are not correct). I remembered the ‘Better Music’ toggle switching to new music files for all 4 level-types, but all archives of the original game I can find only reference the one optional file, as with your list. Is there any chance you’re able to confirm this? Thanks!
October 5th, 2026 at 07:26:54
Cool news!
I can confirm that there are exactly five music files in the “BT Music” folder:
Level set 1 music
Level set 1 music option
Level set 2 music
Level set 3 music
Level set 4 music
plus some code plug-ins the game uses to be able to play these files.
I did confirm that adding another MAD file as, say, “Level set 2 music option” will make the game see it as a “better music” track for another level set. But in terms of the files included with the game, there’s only a “better music” file for level set 1.
I just noticed that the zip file I had originally uploaded with this post was missing, so I just re-created and re-uploaded it.