![]() ![]() Sometimes, though, a sound investigation requires outside historical research in addition to a good ear. ![]() Most of the time, this gives us discoveries without knowing the composer's gear." " if we find some sample from this manufacturer that was used in a game, that gives us a clue to research if the composer used more stuff from this manufacturer. " Prosonus released their stuff in different libraries and other media," Michael said. Often, identification of a single sample can cascade into a chain of discoveries. Other times, I have to take a second or third listen to a song or source, and the connection between them will click for me." "Others, I'll be listening to a plugin or sample and recognize it from a song I know. "Sometimes, I'll be listening to a video game song and I'll hear something in the background and immediately recognize it from a VST plugin or sample library," Miles said. The organized effort to identify original video game sound samples dates back to at least 2012, when user AceKombat started an unassuming thread on the Halley's Comet Software message boards titled "The VGM/Others Instrument Source Thread." Nine years and thousands of posts later, that thread is still going strong, alongside newer Discord servers and Google spreadsheets, in which a community of hundreds of sound sleuths discusses its findings. "I think it can breathe some new life into songs with compressed instruments-hearing them with lost frequencies and with more clarity or clearness" added Miles, a VGM source investigator from the US. ![]() Remastering game tracks from their original sources in this way "provides a better glimpse of what the song would have sounded like as a demo track, before reverse-engineering it for the console," said VGM source investigator and audio producer Moola, based in Upstate New York. That work has resulted in complete, uncompressed recreations for a number of classic gaming tunes that now have a richer, fuller audio profile that can completely change a listener's perspective. He's part of a loose collection of hundreds of video game music (VGM) source investigators who have spent years scouring old audio collections and analyzing classic synthesizer hardware to track down the original, uncompressed samples that were the building blocks for some classic video game tracks. It's like old photo restorations, where they clean the photo and add color to it."Īmerican audiences never even got to hear the compressed version of this tune, much less this high-fidelity recreation. "As a person who enjoys video game music, it made me wonder how the music would sound without those limitations. In some ways, this isn't the best take of the game's music." "Especially if all the audio work is made by the CPU (like on the Nintendo 64), this limitation can distort how the music sounds. "The composer obligated to sacrifice sound quality to get their music running without any lag and to fit into the cartridge," said Michael, a video game music source investigator from El Salvador (who didn't share his last name). The game cartridges couldn't store much data, of course, so the original synthesizer samples usually took a heavy hit in fidelity during the transition to game soundtracks. Games in this era would frequently chain together brief snippets of recorded audio and replay them over and over with different effects, as if they'd been loaded into an electronic keyboard. These were most common in the late cartridge era the samples were nestled between the literal bleeps and bloops of the earliest video game sound chips and the CD-quality audio of the optical disc. Remastering the Super Mario World soundtrack in this way means diving deep into the world of compressed video game audio samples. As a result of this work, one of the biggest games of all time now sounds completely different. Sometimes, it's about taking well-known relics and reconstructing them from newly unearthed and higher-fidelity original component parts. Further Reading We have finally played the lost, official Goldeneye 007 remaster for Xbox 360Classic-gaming archaeology doesn't always revolve around digging up rare and unreleased games. ![]()
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