Hi-Def AO & AE Music Thread
 

Hi everyone,

This is my first post, love being here! Abe's Oddysee was the first ever game I owned and I still love it to bits, as I'm sure you all do.

I'm wondering, how far are we from ripping the AO & AE soundtracks? I've heard some great in-game recordings done and uploaded to this site, but I'm yet to come across a great FLAC or WAV version of the music ripped directly from the sound banks.

I know this is difficult.. I've tried converting a PSF rip of AO (from zophar.net) into WAV but the PSF plugin for foobar 2000 wasn't decoding the files like a playstation would... It was close, but not perfect, i.e. the PSF decoder was adding reverb to the bass in the rupture farms track, and 'muddying' up the whole sound. Out of a playstation the bass is very sharp, crisp and punchy.

I've seen some very cool projects on this forum such as MLG Man's AE sound loader (http://www.oddworldforums.net/showthread.php?t=21492) ... I'm wondering, if things like that are being done, shouldn't it be possible to do an accurate rip of the sounds and midi tracks, and play them back somehow for an accurate high-quality rip?

Please let me know your thoughts, or if this has already been accomplished. If not, how can I help fund this project!?

(Oh and I'm really only looking for people interested in lossless quality here... I know the music itself is very lo-fi, but hearing the bit-crunchy old files in high-def surely beats these v0 mp3 rips IMO!)

Cheers,

Ben

The samples used for the MIDI are themselves low quality. You can play the MIDI files with any soundfont you want and it'll sound as crisp as you want (except, you know, fucked up because of the samples used), but without recreating every single sample at high quality you can't have the original music.

Thanks, that's true about the sound quality being low and not being able to get the original music... That's not what I meant in my original post and I'm sorry I wasn't clear... I'll try to rephrase.

I want a high quality recording (WAV) of the low quality samples, but not recorded in-game... but rather ripped from the disk, played back (somehow) then recorded.

Has this been done? Any info on how someone could do this? Maybe I've got this all completely wrong in my head and need to do some research on PSX sound?

This already exists, somewhere. I have no idea where you can get it these days.

I think it might be the soundtrack from the Japanese version.

Thanks Phylum, I have it actually! Sounds great but quite a few of the loops missing, plus it's got a really crappy hiss through it. I did a sound cleanup this morning and took out the hiss, and it actually sounds ok now, but a shame it's a little incomplete overall.

To do a nice clean recording of both games without SFX, just the music, would be awesome...!

What about music from New N Jasty? Isn't it basically AO soundtrack in hi-def?

Haha I'm not after the original HD music from the first two games... Just a good quality recording of the low quality samples.

But yes I'd love to get my hands on the new n tasty soundtrack too, it's awesome! MB did a great job! Anyone know if / when it's being released?

You can rip it from game, I believe

MlgMan is working with me on the open source ALIVE engine - so playing all music will be possible or almost already is possible. The only problem is that we dont have reverb at the moment.

Turns out adding reverb is quite a hard problem to solve - if you're a music coder let me know if you wanna chip in :)

This is awesome news!!

Sadly I am 100% not an audio coder. I mix audio for film trailers and TV but no coding unfortunately.

Is there a way I could help find someone? Do a fiverr search or something and chip in some dollars? If you had a certain task laid out for someone, I would happily pitch in for them to do it:fuzgrin:

Thanks I'll look into it:hungry:

The full OST for AO is available on The Oddworld Library:
http://oddworldlibrary.net/archives/...icialReleases/

Both as MP3 and FLAC files. You can't have more "HD" sound than that.

And we're also hosting some good rips over here:
http://oddworldlibrary.net/archives/oddtunes/

Source is hosted here: github.com/paulsapps/alive

Sign up to the pateron page if you wanna donate a small amount to pay for build servers etc :) Also if you know technically how reverb works then you will be of use.

Cool will do! And yes, I have a basic knowledge of how they work. PM me with what info you need.

Thanks yes I have all these, I agree that the rips are brilliant, just wish there was more FLAC of exodus lying around. I didn't have Hello-Hello though... that's new to me!!:fuzwink:

I have some sample packs which I discovered contain a few AO/AE samples. It's a long shot but it's definitely possible to find all the original samples or recreate them, and literally remake the tracks.

I'm not at my PC right now but if you're interested I'll find which packs they are and let you know.

If this were mixed with a bit of sound design it sounds like my dream job.

Yep I'd love to hear which samples you have (especially music samples) and a recreation job would be very fun! Even just to try.

And for my job, I'm actually more of an editor... My main work is cutting ads and more recently, film trailers. But I also do sound mixing for what I cut, and quite a bit of sound design too. PM me if you wanna know more! Sorry for running a bit off-topic.

Thanks Xavier, What is Rip.zip ? 509mb?

Nep I would be ecstatic if you could share those for soundfont library creation purposes.

I'd love to hear that :) If you want I can host them on the oddworldlibrary server :)

Music ripped from the game. I'm not exactly sure how, Wil might know more.

Okay I'll have a dig today and see if I can find them again. It was just a couple though.

How do you convert .psf and .minipsf to .mid then? I would love to have the ingame music in MIDI format but I have no idea how to convert it.

MIDI is not audio, it's the programming of the notes and shit like that. Literally just write the melody into Garage Band or something, there's your MIDI.

The SEQ's in the BSQ of the LVL's are MIDI files with a non standard header.

With some Googling you can find a SEQ2MIDI converter.

Have a listen to some stuff I did with the midi files

https://soundcloud.com/mlgthatsme

Oh so you found the samples too?

Also, I see you liked the Vsauce music. Nice.

Nah I have no idea what packs have the sounds, do you know the names of the packs?

Oh and some of the samples I tried recreating and some I just tried to restore with EQ and some other enhancements.

Love the vsauce music :D

Then I don't understand where you got them from. You clearly used the same samples in those remakes, and they sounded like they were of a higher quality, too.

filetype confusion aside, how goes the getting the actual samples, nep?

The samples are in the sounds.dat and VB files, the in progress open source alive engine has all this stuff

https://github.com/paulsapps/alive/b...AliveAudio.cpp

mlg man wrote pretty much all of this. I've not integrated into the engine properly yet so its hard coded to play the secret area music.

I've been being really lazy and haven't actually looked for them yet.

I made a thread about it a while back and nobody would believe that they are the original samples even though they obviously were.