Minecraft - Volume Beta

Minecraft - Volume Beta is the second soundtrack album for Minecraft by C418, the first being Minecraft - Volume Alpha. It was released on November 9, 2013 on C418's Bandcamp website and on Apple Music, with a release later on Spotify. The album includes 30 songs for a total length of about 140 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 (except for "11") and a few bonus tracks that are not in the game (similarly to Minecraft - Volume Alpha). With a less minimalistic style, longer track lengths with more complex structures, and a much greater emphasis on lush, ambient synth sounds, the album has a noticeably darker and more dramatic tone than Volume Alpha, which C418 acknowledges: "The big difference of Volume Beta is that the tone is both more positive and at times very dark. Some of the songs even have percussion, which is something that was a complete rarity with Volume Alpha. For example 'Taswell' or 'Aria Math'." C418 considers Volume Beta to be "dedicated to America and Asia", while Volume Alpha "might be a love record to Europe". One can notice the Asian influence on tracks such as "Aria Math", "Biome Fest", and "Flake".

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.

Trivia

 * Only 2 tracks on this album feature descriptions of some kind; the first being "Biome Fest", which has a link to a video called "Minecraft Biome Test" on Notch's YouTube channel, Nizzotch, which has since been deleted (this is the original link, this is a reupload), and "Intro", with the description "See you next time", which is fitting as it is the last song on the album.
 * This is different from Volume Alpha, as every song on that album had a description or joke of some kind. It may be that this unexpected "silence" is an intentional way to emphasize this album's much darker tone.
 * The album cover is a darker, more surreal and heavily stylized version of the same grass block from the album cover of Volume Alpha, which is likely meant to reflect the darker, more surreal style of Volume Beta, in comparison to its predecessor.
 * A very possible reason why "Ballad of the Cats" has that title is because the sounds of ghasts are distorted recordings of C418's cat.