full quality donkey kong country music

[Nes Freak | 584]

any one following this guy?  he does DKC 1 2 and 3 music restorations and has worked with dave wise to get them as close as possible to the original sound.

 

 

[SuperJimtendo | 1,121]

I Never played much 2 and 3 but 1 was a fantastic game and the soundtrack stuck with me. I couldn’t tell you how mantises a song will just randomly be in my head even when i haven’t played them in years. Thanks for sharing

[TDIRunner | 2,731]

I can hear that video without even hitting play.

[8-bit guerilla | 82]

Did he redo the music or just remaster it? It sounds identical to me.

[Quest4Nes | 376]

1 hour ago, SuperJimtendo said:

I Never played much 2 and 3 but 1 was a fantastic game and the soundtrack stuck with me. I couldn’t tell you how mantises a song will just randomly be in my head even when i haven’t played them in years. Thanks for sharing

wtf is the matter with you? you call yourself a super jimtendo?

[RH | 4,898]

1 hour ago, 8-bit guerilla said:

Did he redo the music or just remaster it? It sounds identical to me.

This is a bit interesting.  Dave Wise also has what were the original MIDI audio for GoldenEye.  These are often mis-named "uncompressed" but what they really are are the original, and final, tracks that Dave came up with for review.  I don't know how getting audio from what was made by Wise into the N64 format worked but, basically, they took that data and translated it to the N64.

My assumption is that Dave took the original SNES score and transposed it back into a high quality MIDI format.

Here's the N64 YouTube video link I have for when I want to listen to the GoldenEye soundtrack.  It's 100% the GoldenEye soundtrack, but in much better quality than the N64 sound.

 

[Sumez | 2,934]

4 hours ago, RH said:

high quality MIDI format

Midi is uncompressed digital instrument data, not sampled audio.

[RH | 4,898]

2 minutes ago, Sumez said:

Midi is uncompressed digital instrument data, not sampled audio.

Correct. I didn't watch any of those making-of videos so I assume the music being played on the videos is music created on the original hardware that Dave would have used when he was writing these tunes and submitting them (possibly as WAV files) for review before they were encoded in the game.

Those videos (and other sources) like the one I linked often misname the audio as "uncompressed". It's not so much uncompressed compared to much of the N64 audio, as it is produced on "original" hardware using the original instrument waveforms that had the "purest" intended sound of the tunes.  And it shows.

[Nes Freak | 584]

7 hours ago, 8-bit guerilla said:

Did he redo the music or just remaster it? It sounds identical to me.

he redid it from scratch

[Quest4Nes | 376]

7 hours ago, 8-bit guerilla said:

Did he redo the music or just remaster it? It sounds identical to me.

Sounds much more crisp to me

[MachineCode | 159]

You can hear the difference in that the individual samples are not downsampled. Everything has a cleaner more extended high frequency range and the mix itself is a little more open and transparent. Aside from clarity, it does a few things. It makes the stereo field sound wider as highs are more directional. Also, it makes the percussion and the bass more punchy sounding as it can fully reproduce the sharp transients. On the SNES version, the bass sounds more muffled and subby, lacking the attack. That being said, as someone who likes older electronic music and hip hop, I am a fan of the effects of low fi sampling. I love that grainy grime you get from the converters aliasing when not being able to perfectly reproduce a waveform. To me, that was a part of the sound of the SNES version that I really like. I like both for different reasons, but I'm not sure which one I like more. From a pure fidelity standpoint the original restored version wins all day though.

[8-bit guerilla | 82]

On 1/6/2020 at 6:06 PM, Quest4Nes said:

Sounds much more crisp to me

Right. As if it were remastered. I just meant the sound samples sound authentic not reproduced.

[MachineCode | 159]

Remastering would not have nearly that amount of difference. Mastering is treatment on the entire 2 track stereo master as a whole so the individual elements are inaccessible. You'd actually be surprised at how little the sound changes in a professional mastering session. It's more like deciding what type of frosting to add to your already baked cake. If the cake is shit, no frosting in the world is gonna change that.

[RH | 4,898]

For comparison sake, I’d like to hear someone do this to Lenna’s Theme from Final Fantasy V, which is my all time favorite SNES/SFC tune.

[Sumez | 2,934]

10 hours ago, RH said:

For comparison sake, I’d like to hear someone do this to Lenna’s Theme from Final Fantasy V, which is my all time favorite SNES/SFC tune.

Not handled anywhere near as well (I think it differs too much from the original), but there's this I guess:

I like this one:

And of course the original "Dear Friends" version is amazing. It's probably my all-time favourite rearranged Final Fantasy CD release.

There are some pretty neat "remasters" of the FF6 soundtrack around on YouTube.

Edited January 8, 2020 by Sumez

[RH | 4,898]

2 hours ago, Sumez said:

Not handled anywhere near as well (I think it differs too much from the original), but there's this I guess:

...

And of course the original "Dear Friends" version is amazing. It's probably my all-time favourite rearranged Final Fantasy CD release.

...

There are some pretty neat "remasters" of the FF6 soundtrack around on YouTube.

Hey, I'm never opposed to a good fan remake.  What I meant was doing something that Wise has done, but for Final Fantasy tunes.  The old hardwared used in these gaming systems often had dedicated chips for making chiptunes.  These were often barebones but the musicians composing the music tended to have better, midi sequencers that they'd compose on.  It's my understanding that from their they would model the data for the SNES audio from those high quality sound waves.  I am assuming a little bit in this process, but from my casual observation, that's my understanding of how this generally worked.

What I'd like to hear are tunes like these Donkey Kong Country tunes, or the GoldenEye OST I posted, where the original artist provided the original, demo tracks, recorded on their original MIDI (or equivalent) so you can hear what they, they artist, composed and hoped to have "squeezed" into the SNES.

EDIT

But speaking of good fan remakes, Hashel on YouTube doesn't have a big subscriber base (less than 1000!) but he puts out some really nice, chill remakes of a lot of solid tunes, across many genres of games.  He's worth subscribing too, if you're into that type of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcpgG0SRIUPuY-HSS_QWgBw 

Edited January 8, 2020 by RH

[Sumez | 2,934]

The SNES is especially interesting in regards to "remastering" music, because the SNES sound chip in fact has absolutely no way of producing chip tunes (ie. on-the-fly sound synthesis)

It's entirely based on copying sound samples into audio memory, and playing those with commands to a unique audio processor created by Sony (the SPC700). So everything you're hearing is a sample being played back at some frequency - and some programmers were able to use clever tricks to enforce better clarity, or even generate or mix samples on the fly (Tim Follin comes to mind, but David Wise was definitely able to push the sound chip to new levels). But typically all SNES music just suffers from limitations in playback rate and audio RAM, forcing all the sound to have an incredibly low sample rate.

A perfect SNES tune remaster would be based on the original samples before they got downsampled and stored on the SNES cartridge.

This is especially jarring in music simulating real instruments because it will always sound like a low quality recording of each individual note. But you can make really cool sounding electronic music or faux chiptune using the SNES, that'll come across super clean. That's just not what most musicians were doing because they wanted to abuse this new sample based hardware to make something completely "new" that wasn't possible on other systems. High frequencies and instrument separation is typically one of the biggest challenges faced by SNES composers, causing a lot of music to sound muddled.

Edited January 8, 2020 by Sumez

[RH | 4,898]

11 minutes ago, Sumez said:

The SNES is especially interesting in regards to "remastering" music, because the SNES sound chip in fact has absolutely no way of producing chip tunes (ie. on-the-fly sound synthesis)

It's entirely based on copying sound samples into audio memory, and playing those with commands to a unique audio processor created by Sony (the SPC700). So everything you're hearing is a sample being played back at some frequency - and some programmers were able to use clever tricks to enforce better clarity, or even generate or mix samples on the fly (Tim Follin comes to mind, but David Wise was definitely able to push the sound chip to new levels). But typically all SNES music just suffers from limitations in playback rate and audio RAM, forcing all the sound to have an incredibly low sample rate.

A perfect SNES tune remaster would be based on the original samples before they got downsampled and stored on the SNES cartridge.

This is especially jarring in music simulating real instruments because it will always sound like a low quality recording of each individual note. But you can make really cool sounding electronic music or faux chiptune using the SNES, that'll come across super clean. That's just not what most musicians were doing because they wanted to abuse this new sample based hardware to make something completely "new" that wasn't possible on other systems. High frequencies and instrument separation is typically one of the biggest challenges faced by SNES composers, causing a lot of music to sound muddled.

Aaaaah, I didn’t know that about the SNES specifically.  My limited research on the topic has covered the NES, Game Boy and the Genesis.  I knew the way the SNES handled audio was different than the Genesis but not to which degree. 

[MachineCode | 159]

Ye. The SNES was basically a MIDI sampler/sequencer similar to like an MPC or SP1200 or EMAX that could do ASDR envelope shaping, pitching, looping, and some DSP effects like a basic reverb and delay(echo) and some filters. The sample rate of the system was 32 khz so it could only accurately reproduce frequencies up to 16 khz vs the 44.1 khz of a cd which maxes out at 22.05 khz which is just about the top of human hearing.

Edited January 9, 2020 by MachineCode

[Sumez | 2,934]

Except you had to program it yourself.

[MachineCode | 159]

51 minutes ago, Sumez said:

Except you had to program it yourself.

Yes, can't forget that important detail. Your MPC doesn't share its RAM and processor with a fully functional video game either. But once you HAVE programmed it, it conceptually works in that manner unlike a Genesis which is more like a Yamaha DX7 or other FM synth