Topic: castlevania soundtrack "restoration" project

[bucky]

Introduction / What this project is about:
I feel like Konami did a poor job of documenting most of their older Castlevania soundtracks. By drenching them in reverb and making them muddier, or not including complete soundtracks across ports with different sound chips, I always felt like there was something left to be desired. My goal is to supply newer complete rips to the intarwebs with the most accurate raw hardware sound possible, asides from possibly cleaning up the audio output of the console itself first.

Castlevania: The Adventure (Game Boy, model DMG-01)
FLAC - http://tinyurl.com/2fjrq34
224k MP3 - http://tinyurl.com/2fnr3yp
Youtube Playlist

Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge (Game Boy, model DMG-01)
FLAC - http://tinyurl.com/2d2w47w
224k MP3 - http://tinyurl.com/24yk6p2
Youtube Playlist

Castlevania Legends (Game Boy, model DMG-01)
FLAC - http://tinyurl.com/22n8zr4
224k MP3 - http://tinyurl.com/29a6wm3
Youtube Playlist

[Abnormal Freak]

Hey, cool. :) I admit, I like some of the reverb on the OSTs, but I'd also like having the soundtracks as they are in-game. The Game Boy games don't sound the prettiest on the OSTs, however; they definitely sound loads better how they are originally.

Looking forward to more soundtracks completed in this way.

That's really cool about playing directly from the Game Boy. I know a lot of people use Game Boys to create music, which I find really fascinating.

[bucky]

Thanks! One cool part about this is that if you do like reverb, but think you can do a better or more careful job than Konami did, you can just open up the FLACs and give it a shot yourself.

Last on my priority list is the NES soundtracks. I'll do them, but unlike GB emulation, there is some very decent and hard-to-tell-the-difference quality of emulation out there. For the time being, people can listen to the NSF files, and that's pretty darn good. The Game Boy soundtracks and Castlevania Bloodlines both suffer from generally worse emulation quality (whether it be a full game emulator or the emulated audio formats, gbs and vgm), so I plan on doing those all first.

[uzo]

You realize that FLAC on chiptunes is COMPLETELY USELESS?

[Abnormal Freak]

I guess I wouldn't know the technical aspects, but how exactly are FLACs useless for chiptunes? I realize there's only so much quality and complexity to be replicated, but wouldn't a FLAC have more fidelity for such low-quality sounds than a compressed format, even if the end result is miniscule if not entirely unnoticeable?

Last on my priority list is the NES soundtracks. I'll do them [eventually.]

I'm looking forward to high quality rips of the NES version of Castlevania II whenever that gets handled. Do you think you'll be doing both the NES and Famicom versions of Castlevania III?

[bucky]

You realize that FLAC on chiptunes is COMPLETELY USELESS?

You're more than welcome to download the 224k MP3 set!

I don't disagree that FLAC is kind of overkill, since I can't really tell the difference between that and the MP3s I made, but I've heard low bit-rate mp3s of game music that sounded quite poor. Compression does have an impact, somewhere along the road. Plus if I'm going extra lengths to get proper hardware recordings, why not share a lossless version of the result? All it takes is exporting two different formats from audacity, and it doesn't bother me to do so.

I'm looking forward to high quality rips of the NES version of Castlevania II whenever that gets handled. Do you think you'll be doing both the NES and Famicom versions of Castlevania III?

Absolutely! I already sampled both CV2 and CV3 (the 4 different US/ FDS + US/ VRC6 versions), but this was a while back and not from hardware. I think they're still nicer than the OSTs though, since they didn't make complete versions of all regions available. I believe the official CV2 OST is mostly just the FDS tracks? Anyone interested in them just send me a PM and I'll send you a link to their zips.

The one current roadblock is that while I've modded my US NES to support expansion audio, I don't own Akumajou Densetsu, nor an FDS unit and Dracula II. I don't normally need the game, because I can dump NSFs onto the powerpak and sample them off of the console. However, the powerpak doesn't actually have all those extra fancy mapper chips in the cart itself, it has to emulate them as well. And the emulation, at least from the FDS games I tried, had an audio quality not even as good as some NSF players, defeating the purpose of using the hardware. But I have some friends into collecting famicom games, so I can probably just buy CV3J, or borrow it, when I need to.

Dracula II will take a bit more dedication, but I'll worry about that later when the time comes.

[Abnormal Freak]

Yeah, Akumajo Dracula Best mostly had the Dracula II FDS tunes. They're not as good as the Simon's Quest NES tunes, in my opinion, so it'd be nice to have the whole NES soundtrack in high quality. But yeah, Dracula II would certainly be interesting to hear if you ever do get a Disk System and the game. You'd also need the FDS version of Akumajo Dracula to make a complete soundtrack, since there's the naming BGM, "Underground". Aside from that, anyone know if there are any differences between the Akumajo Dracula FDS music and the Castlevania NES/Akumajo Dracula FC music? It's always sounded the same to me, but I've never done side-by-side comparisons, and I've always been a little curious about that.

And yeah, I've come across too many low quality rips—really low bitrate MP3s that do affect the quality immensely. FLAC probably is overkill, but it's still a nice option. I wouldn't accept anything lower than 192kbps MP3s, to be honest, because there's definitely a difference even when converting sounds from old hardware.

Also, a lot of rips are made from emulators, and that's just not cool by my standards (especially when certain emulators don't emulate the sound properly). So I appreciate what you're doing here. Whenever you get around to the SNES games, if you figure a way to record from the hardware or whatever, I'd really love a high quality rip of Dracula X.

[uzo]

Chip tune music has a certain quality limit, by nature. NES and GB music especially have a low range, and so at some point, you just cant get any higher quality. For SNES it is a higher threshold, but still no way you'd ever need anything close to flac. It wouldn't make any difference what so ever since the sound couldn't possibly reach to the higher quality range by design.

It's a good thought in concept, but really you could just set to 320vbr and be way more than set for anything you'd be doing.

[Abnormal Freak]

I think we can all agree that the ancient 128 and 160kbps MP3 rips of yore can be thrown out the window, though, ha ha. Still waiting even for high quality rips of some of the official CDs, like the Perfect Selection Dracula Battle albums. If I could buy 'em, I would.

[bucky]

Yeah, Akumajo Dracula Best mostly had the Dracula II FDS tunes. They're not as good as the Simon's Quest NES tunes, in my opinion, so it'd be nice to have the whole NES soundtrack in high quality. But yeah, Dracula II would certainly be interesting to hear if you ever do get a Disk System and the game. You'd also need the FDS version of Akumajo Dracula to make a complete soundtrack, since there's the naming BGM, "Underground". Aside from that, anyone know if there are any differences between the Akumajo Dracula FDS music and the Castlevania NES/Akumajo Dracula FC music?

Ah, they are identical! And thankfully I won't need the FDS game. Since it doesn't use the extra FDS channel, the NSF playback on the NES will be accurate. And what's cool is that "Underground" is in the US Castlevania NSF anyways. In spite of taking out the name entry screen, the track can still be found in unused ROM data. I recall finding that track before I knew about the name entry screen, and it freaked me out because I thought it belonged to some undiscovered secret area / item. lol

edit: For the SNES, I need to inquire if the Super Powerpak supports .spc playback. If it does, I might just have to grab one! Then I could sample almost any SNES soundtrack I wanted to.

[Abnormal Freak]

Oh, cool! Good to know the tune's there despite being unused.

[uzo]

I think we can all agree that the ancient 128 and 160kbps MP3 rips of yore can be thrown out the window, though, ha ha. Still waiting even for high quality rips of some of the official CDs, like the Perfect Selection Dracula Battle albums. If I could buy 'em, I would.

Yeah. I would buy those albums too just to get a higher quality rip. Long over due.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Man, today I was listening to my CV tunes on the Droid, and the quality jump is very noticeable from my old MP3s from, say, CV3 or something, and the stuff from Order of Ecclesia, partly due to the instrument samples improving but mostly due to the fact that I'm using high-quality VBR instead of old 128CBR.  It's quite noticeable...

...but I'm not sure I can recreate my old tunes, as many were made when I had different instruments and before several hard-drive crashes.

Having a new version of the old chiptunes is good, because, like people have said, Konami went waaaaaay overboard with the reverb in their OSTs for them.  It's like I'm in a cave listening to 'em.

[bucky]

edit: Nevermind! I was asking about official track titles for Castlevania Legends, because of some discrepancies across different rips out there. But I found my answer here-
http://www.gamefaqs.com/gameboy/564357-castlevania-legends/faqs/25767


With the 'research' part finally out of the way, you can expect a proper rip of Legends soon.

[Abnormal Freak]

There's this too for the translated titles for the official soundtrack (disc 5, tracks 1–20). That way you're not naming anything "???? (Okada 8)" and so on. ;)