Audio Replacement Projects ?

[enterthehatrix]

No doubt this has been mentioned a million times over, but I couldn't find anything with a straight forward answer through search, so I'd like to know...

There are texture replacements, so would it be possible to do music replacement? For example, a folder full of MP3s which execute the sounds as opposed to running the songs embedded in the ROM.

I've read that "you cant replace the songs because the N64 synthesises the music" or something like that, but why can't the music be in MP3 format outside the ROM like the images are bitmaps and pngs outside the ROM?

 

[Im Bored]

its half and half. Coding a standalone app that launches mp3s when a specific statement is met in the game is possible.

But lets be serious. How many people are going to fully be able to replace music? Lets say a hi-res equivalent of music; replacing Mario 64s score with orchestral pieces of high quality. A decent sound card (not just geared for games) is required, musical knowledge is required, the software and dedication is also required.

Itd be a lot harder, I reckon, to create better music than it is to retexture. So its a good idea in theory, but in practice, there wouldnt be that much call for it. Some use of the zelda scores recorded.. a few samples here and there for other games...

:s

 

[enterthehatrix]

its half and half. Coding a standalone app that launches mp3s when a specific statement is met in the game is possible.

But lets be serious. How many people are going to fully be able to replace music? Lets say a hi-res equivalent of music; replacing Mario 64s score with orchestral pieces of high quality. A decent sound card (not just geared for games) is required, musical knowledge is required, the software and dedication is also required.

Itd be a lot harder, I reckon, to create better music than it is to retexture. So its a good idea in theory, but in practice, there wouldnt be that much call for it. Some use of the zelda scores recorded.. a few samples here and there for other games...

:s

I suppose you're right about not everyone having the musical ability to do it, but there is still practicalities for others using different music in games.. For example, if making a retro Zelda Ocarina of Time retexture pack, it would be good if we could replace the music too, to make it a fully modded game. Those aren't hard to find, and I think it's worth having than not.. If nobody uses it, what difference does it make if a few do use it?

 

[Im Bored]

thats a good point too.

Of course its all moot as right now there isnt a proper way to do it, and the way i suggested isnt too practical. : (

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

A great example of a good time to use this in a game would be F-Zero X. There's an offical sound track out there with high sound quality rock music of the track music. That would be awesome to race to!

 

[Doomulation]

Well, graphics are graphics and sound is sound. Textures are widely used in all games, thus the plugin can replace them when loading textures. Music, on the other hand, is synthesized, so it isn't quite as easy. The main problem is that it isn't the actual hardware that does it - it's actually the games themselves to synthesize the music. I would reckon that is a big problem.

 

[zilmar]

One of the big problems with the Audio vs Gfx for replacement. There is hardware that does the textures, and we are replacing it at the hardware level. For audio the hardware level is very primative. It just plays back one audio input. All music and sound effects are done via software. So what method works for one game will not nessarly work for the next as they might use a different method.

Azimer HLE audio plugin since it handles a lot more of the processing of audio might be able to look more at the inputs to have a chance of replacing it. But audio replacement due to the way games do it is about 100 times more work then texture replacement.

 

[Enzo Dragon]

I've brought this up a bit ago.

I think that although it'd be pretty sweet to see someone from this board to remake a game's soundtrack, it's not necessary for something like this to work. It's likely that, instead of having a bunch of people on here remixing the songs, we'd have a bunch of people putting in the official soundtrack MP3's for certain games.

Music dumping has already been done, so we know where the song files are kept in a ROM. Why not write a plug-in that, when a ROM goes too look for a song file within itself, it is redirected to a library within a folder outside of the ROM, much like how hires_texturing works (as I understand it). That way, it's not necessary to find all of the statements within a game that will ask for a sound file - you'll be having those statements looking for the songs in your custom library.

Or is that impossible...? If so, why?

 

[loopsider]

the actual creation of the music is the easiest part. Without being a perfectionist, I could make a semi-realistic sounding version of the "inside the castle walls" Mario 64 song in less than 15 minutes using free samples and putting together parts from pre-made MIDI files from the internet. Even then, real little musical knowledge is required. That is, of course, unless we are trying to make a metal style zelda mp3 pack, then we have to actually record sounds in a more-or-less professional manner.

 

[Ion Dune]

Yes. I too believe that the problem is not the sole creation of the music, but the implementing of it into the game. Members of this forum could easily put together tracks from the internet into a working piece (as said by loopsider) and there are even some members here who could possibly record some replacement songs by themselves, to almost a professional sounding level.

We need to focus more on how it can be done, not what would be done for it if it was done. I myself believe that I could hold up part of the music end if ever needed, but right now it appears that there is no easy way for the task to be accomplished.

 

[Toasty]

As was mentioned before, each game can produce sound differently, so there is no one-size-fits-all method of replacing sound in a game. If you don't think it's complicated, try your hand at it.

 

[Enzo Dragon]

As was mentioned before, each game can produce sound differently, so there is no one-size-fits-all method of replacing sound in a game. If you don't think it's complicated, try your hand at it.

Why are sound plugins possible, then, if there is no consistency? It's very interesting.

 

[Ion Dune]

I'm not saying the software part is easy, nor am I saying it's possible. I'm just saying that the problem lies in software, not in creating new music itself.

 

[Toasty]

Why are sound plugins possible, then, if there is no consistency? It's very interesting.

That's sort of like asking, "Why are sound cards possible when computers have so many ways of creating sound data?" The CPU is responsible for generating sound data. The sound hardware is only responsible for turning that data into sound (or at least electrical impulses that mimic sound). Sound plugins, which replace the original console's sound hardware, are equally 'ignorant' of how the sound data was generated and where it came from. They take the sound samples generated by the CPU and send them to the host platform's sound hardware indiscriminately. That's a fairly simple explanation, but AFAIK, that's the way it works. (Anyone more knowledgeable than I is welcome to correct me or elaborate if need be.)

 

[Reaper666]

I think the way texture replacement works is by quickly calculating a hash of the image loaded into the N64's gpu and seeing if a file exists under that file name and if so loading that instead of using the original texture buffer. I'm not sure how it works on N64 but often times music is only streamed and not loaded all at once which would make hashing impossible and it wouldn't be able to work this way. The graphics and sound subsystems are very different, the game feeds the sound processor an audio signal and maybe some info about volume gain and channel balance but with graphics the entire image is loaded into a buffer and then a pointer to that buffer is given to the GPU and the GPU is able to differentiate between different textures if it wanted to. This is why there's not much you can replace in a rom with this method, models aren't given to the GPU all at once only vertex by vertex so the GPU doesn't know which vertex starts and ends a particular model also making hashing impossible for model/geometry replacement. If the plugin knew how each particular rom loaded sounds, models, or anything like that then maybe it could do replacements.

 

[Enzo Dragon]

Alright. I sorta' get this now. Thanks, Toasty and Reaper.

So does this mean that any sort of audio replacement project would have to be ROM specific? That is, an audio plug-in designed to understand the sound method of a specific game?

 

[Cyberman]

The only way I can think of doing any sound replacement is to use HLE. This looks for library calls, for performing certain functions within the game. This may require more than just a plugin make over to do therefore.

The playstation emulators do not have this feature. FF7 for the PC does (hacked by happy people), to provide better sound. This is not an easy feature to implement. Really the only way to implement it without pulling teeth appears to be via HLE (IE look for library calls to sound playing routines).

Cyb

 

[Yekolf]

i dont think you should compare the music to the textures, you should compare it to the models

 

[tailslol]

i got a question ,is it possible to create a audio plugin with mp3 player in it,

for using it we should rename the mp3 trak with the phisical name in the rom (like texture pack in rice)
and when the plugin load the n64 sound with the same adress as the mp3 the plugin continue emulate sound but dont output it and instead run the mp3 player?
i know it seems to be a bit messy and all the mp3 sound pack can be realy dificult to rename
but it can be ok if we got a prog witch give the corect names of the music in a txt file i think...or output wawe or mp3 sound with the corect name

 

[Doomulation]

Did you read what zilmar wrote on the first page? In short, no, it won't be possible unless you want to do game specific hacks, which will require a lot of time.