Minecraft - Volume Beta

Minecraft - Volume Beta is the second Minecraft soundtrack album by C418, the first being Minecraft - Volume Alpha. It was released on November 9, 2013 on Bandcamp and Apple Music, with a later release on Spotify. The album includes 30 songs for a total length of about 140 minutes. It features many music tracks that were "silently" added to Minecraft in the Music Update a few days after the album's release, as well as the music discs that were missing from the first album (except for "11"). Similarly to Volume Alpha, Volume Beta includes short bonus tracks that are not in the game. 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 on his website, saying: "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", "Dreiton", 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" that was on Notch's YouTube channel, Nizzotch, but 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 dark, 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.
 * The music disc tracks are in stereo, as opposed to their in-game versions, which are in mono. It is likely that the in-game versions are in mono so as to make it seem as if the sound is coming from one single source (a jukebox) instead of from all around the listener.
 * It is equally possible that either the stereo versions or the mono versions of the music disc tracks were created first. The soundtrack versions are either the original tracks from before they were mixed down to mono for the game, or remasters of the original mono tracks that intended to provide a more "complete" listening experience outside of the game. Which version came first could also vary from track to track.