Pokémon Company Releases a ‘Sound Library’ for Listening to Diamond & Pearl Tracks

The Pokémon Company has released an online sound library allowing users to listen to music tracks and sound effects from the original Pokémon Diamond and Pearl games.

The sound library has 149 different tracks and sound effects from the original 2006 versions of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl but doesn’t feature any of the updated music from last year’s remakes.

Users can select their six favourite songs to combine in a “party track”, a reference to the Pokémon games’ six-character party system. A number of curated playlists are also available to play, named Adventurous, Power-Up, Challenge, and Relax.

It’s not clear if this is a one-off project, or if other Pokémon (or Nintendo) games’ tracks could be released as their own libraries in future.

Users can also download the music to use in their own creative pursuits and performances, and a single from Japanese performer and DJ Alan Shirahama has already been released, which samples elements of the library.

Shirahama, who became popular in 2012 as a member of Japan’s Generations pop group, has created a song from the music called “On my way to Glory” that was released alongside the sound library itself.

He said: “To be given an opportunity to arrange Pokémon game music like this is such a fulfilling and wild experience for me. My younger self would have been overjoyed by the very idea. I like my beats to roll with a story-like structure and momentum, so I started off by conceptualizing how a Pokémon Trainer’s everyday life would play out.”

The news comes shortly after Nintendo removed a number of videos from the popular YouTube channel GilvaSunner for using its music, prompting the channel to be deleted on February 4. It’s not clear if the moves are connected, but the timing is… curious.

Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were released last year and IGN called them “great”, saying they “are solid and enduring – leaning on the past, with all of its triumphs and tripwires.”

IGN said the series’ latest release, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, was “good”, and “an ambitious revamp that successfully revolutionizes the defining Pokémon experiences of catching and battling, but is unfortunately set in a drab, empty, and at times tedious world.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale.