Ed Oscuro
10-27-2004, 07:24 PM
I'd appreciate some help - how does one go about finding the output in HZ for various sound chips in arcade/console games? In particular, I'd be fascinated to discover what HZ the YM2151 puts out.
I've been trying to pare down some WAV files using Ogg Vorbis (oggdropXPd (http://www.rarewares.org/ogg.html) for my tool), and I realized that I'm just hunting around in the dark picking and choosing quality levels. It seems to me that one can't really use a standard set of pointers as the system works on audio after its own fashion - you have to encode and then listen - but it's like that with any encoder, I suppose.
For Ninja Spirit (file so far found here (http://home.comcast.net/~edoscuro/nspirit_theme_from_shinobi.ogg)), I found that selecting 2 on the quality bar works just fine. Turning it down further to 1.5 didn't appear to change the sound at all from the original - I played both "side by side" for many minutes and came to this conclusion. I had to push it down to 1 to create a noticeable (and annoying, especially during the beginning) tinny effect. Using the "resample" to various HZ levels makes the sound "distant" and generally turned out to be a bad thing. I ended up setting on quality level 2 because I had the odd feeling there was some lowering of the quality causing the tinny stuff in the first bit to overwhelm the rest of the audio a touch - not very noticeable but I was obsessing over it :)
So...from 15.4 MB to 1.33 MB, and the quality is of course vastly superior to MP3!
It also appears that MAME output the WAV sound in the correct format - mono sound for Ninja Spirit, which is exactly what the doctor ordered. While I tried using that option, the program notified me that it couldn't convert formats, and in any case it sounds 100% mono to me.
Anyway, had some fun with the tags as well. I tried "International Rental Electronics Machines" (yes, both apparently are plural o_O) but noticed that was taking up two whole bars in Winamp :P
I've been trying to pare down some WAV files using Ogg Vorbis (oggdropXPd (http://www.rarewares.org/ogg.html) for my tool), and I realized that I'm just hunting around in the dark picking and choosing quality levels. It seems to me that one can't really use a standard set of pointers as the system works on audio after its own fashion - you have to encode and then listen - but it's like that with any encoder, I suppose.
For Ninja Spirit (file so far found here (http://home.comcast.net/~edoscuro/nspirit_theme_from_shinobi.ogg)), I found that selecting 2 on the quality bar works just fine. Turning it down further to 1.5 didn't appear to change the sound at all from the original - I played both "side by side" for many minutes and came to this conclusion. I had to push it down to 1 to create a noticeable (and annoying, especially during the beginning) tinny effect. Using the "resample" to various HZ levels makes the sound "distant" and generally turned out to be a bad thing. I ended up setting on quality level 2 because I had the odd feeling there was some lowering of the quality causing the tinny stuff in the first bit to overwhelm the rest of the audio a touch - not very noticeable but I was obsessing over it :)
So...from 15.4 MB to 1.33 MB, and the quality is of course vastly superior to MP3!
It also appears that MAME output the WAV sound in the correct format - mono sound for Ninja Spirit, which is exactly what the doctor ordered. While I tried using that option, the program notified me that it couldn't convert formats, and in any case it sounds 100% mono to me.
Anyway, had some fun with the tags as well. I tried "International Rental Electronics Machines" (yes, both apparently are plural o_O) but noticed that was taking up two whole bars in Winamp :P