I have even higher res versions of the OSTs I made

[CommanderBubba]

Hey guys,

I just wanted to mention that for the Genesis and Sega CD soundtracks that I have worked on I encoded them in different formats.

To conserve bandwidth for SegaXtreme, I uploaded the tracks as mp3PRO tracks, which require a special winamp plugin to sound "their best". I thought it was the best compromise between quality, file size and compatibility across different platforms and was a better choice than 128-160 kbps standard MP3.

However, I took my original, raw recordings (I made them using Adobe Audition from a direct line input to the sound card and saved them in lossless format) and I used the Windows Media 9 Professional codecs to produce higher-quality VBR files.

So, if you're interested in them, drop me a line and I'll pass them along.

Currently, the OSTs I have done are:

Phantasy Star II

Phantasy Star IV

ToeJam and Earl 2

Sword of Vermillion

And coming soon:

Popful Mail

ToeJam and Earl 1

Sonic The Hedgehog 1, 2, 3

 

[racketboy]

so what format/bitrate are they going to be in now?

 

[Alexvrb]

I personally don't care much for MP3Pro - if you're going to go VBR route, you can produce good MP3s with LAME at decent bitrates. But WMA works too. Anyway, good work on recording them though - if that's what you did. Was your source a Genesis?

 

[it290]

WMA? How about Ogg?

 

[racketboy]

I don't know what's wrong with just a well encoded MP3.

It's standard. Standard is good.

 

[mal]

WMA?

 

[Alexvrb]

Originally posted by racketboy@Mar 19, 2004 @ 06:56 AM

I don't know what's wrong with just a well encoded MP3.

It's standard. Standard is good.

I agree, I would just fire up LAME myself and encode away. But if he uses WMA (as long as he doesn't screw anything up) it won't be any worse than MP3, and it doesn't require me to download anything. Ogg is obviously superior to mp3/mp3pro/wma, but I dislike having to use their stupid filter. I can't believe they managed to make their codec practically anti-ACM... there's only 1 ACM codec for it, and I've heard its not reliable/good/etc. Did I just confuse everyone?

 

[racketboy]

Well devices such as my DVD player, portable CD player and most MP3 players can play MP3s and not WMA. PCs aren't the only thing we listed to music on...

 

[Alexvrb]

Originally posted by racketboy@Mar 19, 2004 @ 06:38 PM

Well devices such as my DVD player, portable CD player and most MP3 players can play MP3s and not WMA. PCs aren't the only thing we listed to music on...

I'm not so sure about that, most modern devices that support MP3 also support WMA at the least. But yeah, I see your point, except that these are downloaded to our PCs - we can always re-encode them if need be. But I agree nonetheless. Oh yeah, and stop following me around!

 

[racketboy]

umm -- depends what you mean by "modern".

If modern = last 8 months or so, maybe.

 

[CommanderBubba]

I recorded the tracks using my Genesis CDX console with a shielded line-out cable to this computer's sound card line input jack.

The reason I made them the way I did is twofold ;P

1 - I'm doing all my recording in Adobe Audition. Audition comes with, uses, and prefers the mp3PRO codec to do MP3 whether I like it or not, and since it's the 30-day "tryout" version I can't really change that. At least it's the full version of the codec, not the crippled 96 kbps version that you can download for free. I store the original recordings in lossless format first, then encode stuff for upload. I can change it around to make "standard" MP3 files but I decided to use mp3PRO VBR encoding (on maximum quality setting) so that the files would be small and we could conserve a bit of bandwidth. I think they sound pretty good if you use the plugin.

I thought about using Audition to produce WAV files first, and then use something like BeSweet + LAME or OGGmachine to do my encoding but I decided that was too much work. Audition can basically do everything I want to do all at once: batch encode files, clean up noise distortion, add fade effects, etc. and it's got an incredibly fast implementation. I've never seen a program convert audio that quickly.

2 - I did a bunch of experimentation with the Windows Media 9 codec and I tweaked it to get tracks that sound indistinguishable from the original line input from the game console. They're VBR files, and they average in the range of 192-256 kbps. Again, Audition hooks right into that codec and can crunch a raw 3-minute song in about 6 seconds. Honestly, I consider myself the most picky person about encoded music that I know and I actually can't tell the difference between these and the original. All you need to play it is Windows Media Player or Media Player Classic (from SourceForge.net) and the codec, which just about everyone has anyways unless you're a Mac or Linux type.

I personally like the (gasp mg: ) WMA files I made a little bit better than the other formats, especially on headphones. I'm not prejudiced either way, I just decided to go with what I thought was the best tool for the job.

SO.... if you'd care to take a listen and decide for yourself, I can e-mail the stuff to you. I just thought I'd offer since I had them anyways.

 

[CommanderBubba]

I was looking in a flyer that came in the newspaper today for car stereo CD players made by Panasonic and a bunch of other companies (I think maybe about 6 different brands) and they all supported CD, CD-R, and CD-RW for standard cd audio, MP3, and WMA. They weren't even that expensive.

I agree with you on the "standard" part; if these tracks were coming off of CD's I'd use my Sound Blaster Live software's full-blown Fraunhofer MP3 codec to make 256 kbps MP3s out of them and be done with it. It's just because I have to record and "digitally master" (yeah right :lol: ) the tracks myself that I'm trying out something different, messing around with VBR encoding.

 

[it290]

I agree, I would just fire up LAME myself and encode away. But if he uses WMA (as long as he doesn't screw anything up) it won't be any worse than MP3, and it doesn't require me to download anything. Ogg is obviously superior to mp3/mp3pro/wma, but I dislike having to use their stupid filter. I can't believe they managed to make their codec practically anti-ACM... there's only 1 ACM codec for it, and I've heard its not reliable/good/etc. Did I just confuse everyone?

Heh, well, I hate having to use their stupid operating system to listen to WMA files.. they managed to make it practically anti-everyone.

 

[Alexvrb]

Bubba, does that software support ACM codecs? Because they have an ACM compile of LAME in one of their recent (stable) builds, I've got it around here somewhere. It's fairly fast, and on quality crushes even commercial MP3 encoders 90% of the time.

If it doesn't support standard ACM codecs, you could just use CDex. CDex has a nice GUI and would be more than happy to easily encode all the raws/lossless you've captured with Audition. It comes with a fairly recent version of LAME built in (which you could replace with a newer one if you wanted), just configure the settings and go.

 

[CommanderBubba]

I'm not sure, I think I might have seen ACM formats/codecs in there... I wasn't too worried about exporting to other programs when I was doing it, I was more interested in learning how to get Audition to do everything for me. I should look on the Adobe tutorials and help and message board to see if anyone else has written how to incorporate other codecs into it. I'm sure it's possible, at least if I actually bought it and stopped using the demo (which is going to expire on me in a few days anyways). Audition is for more than just recording, you can create multitrack music, remix stuff, or even create 6-channel or 8-channel surround sound fields and run them through an AC3 (Dolby Digital) or DTS encoder. But I'm not a sound engineer, I just like playing with software that professionals use sometimes.

Oh well, I think I'll just leave what I've done alone anyways. Aside from taking a lot of time to get maybe another 2-5% (if even that) increase in quality, if I changed em too much it'd just be unnecessary extra work for Flakvin and IceMan to redo the download pages and change everything again.

I'm not entirely sure if the Genesis' actual audio output for synthesized music is much higher than 22-30 KHz in practice anyways. (Anybody know the answer to that one?)

My goal through all this was mainly to get it so that when I played a track on the Sega console, muted the audio, and then played the same track from the recording moments later, that I couldn't tell any difference. I think the MP3s I made almost do it (it depends on your sound card and speakers) and the WMAs I made have done it. And, the OSTs I re-did (The PS II and IV OSTs) are much better than the old ones we had before.

 

[Alexvrb]

Well, yeah, they're already submitted. That's fine. I'm just saying that in the future, it is possible to do excellent work even with old MP3 at bitrates like that, whether you are using CBR or VBR with LAME (or something that uses LAME). I understand your want to use Audition to capture them, but you might just want to capture to lossless and then batch encode them afterwards. I agree that it is best to have soundtracks that sound exactly like they should, especially with older systems that rely on synthesized music.

Speaking of lossless, I need to go edit my post in your other thread. I forgot to mention Monkey's!