KVR Audio

Calcobrena · Post by **Calcobrena** » Fri Jul 26, 2019 11:12 pm

Hey everybody.

I've been very curious about the method by which sound engineers/programmers who worked alongside composers reduced the filesize/downsampled samples for use on consoles such as the Nintendo Gameboy Advance and the Nintendo DS. The main takeaway, I feel, is that the resulting artifacted samples have a lot more built-in noise, compression and are converted to mono, but I was wondering if anybody had any suggestions as to how this was actually tackled in practice?

I can produce very similar results by pre-treating samples (squashing the dynamic range suitably enough), then running them through dBpoweramp Music Converter (outputting them to 22kHz, reducing the bit depth to 8 bit), but I've noticed in the raw sample files I've been able to rip from some DS titles, that the bit depth of the files are 16 bit. Reducing the bit depth to 16 bit through dBpoweramp doesn't produce the characteristic noisiness found in those DS samples, which makes me how (or what caused them to, really) they reached that sound (assumedly it wasn't stylistic choice). Not only that, but a lot of the time the sample rates on the DS samples aren't perfect, some falling in at numbers that don't divide perfectly into 44100.

Examples of what I mean in terms of sound quality:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k525PqOGWAI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0sves087iU

yellowmix · Post by **yellowmix** » Fri Jul 26, 2019 11:58 pm

Don't forget the samples are being played back through a DAC, which impacts what it sounds like. You can look up hardware specs for that.

Bit depth only impacts the noise floor. It's the bitrate and interpolation methods you need to examine.

legendCNCD · Post by **legendCNCD** » Sun Jul 28, 2019 10:33 am

Wanna check this one? https://www.kvraudio.com/product/chipcrusher-by-plogue

Forgotten · Post by **Forgotten** » Sun Jul 28, 2019 3:48 pm

Have you checked out Cyclone from Sonic Charge?

This thread is a good start point for it, as it shows the link to a thread with some resources to get things started:

https://soniccharge.com/forum/topic/433 ... m-the-past

sleepcircle · Post by **sleepcircle** » Wed Aug 14, 2019 2:17 pm

IN ALL LIKELIHOOD the samples are being uLaw encoded or something, and are ACTUALLY 8-bit, and the fact that the samples you're getting are 16-bit is because they were converted from 8-bit uLaw format which is unlistenable in its encoded state

Replicating downsampling approach used for sequenced music on limited hardware