Shenmue Audio Restoration Project.

[Dewey]

As we all know, the audio in the re-release of Shenmue 1+2 is well... garbage (at least for English, from what I've heard, Japanese sounds way better... In Shenmue). There's no way around it; voices sound horrible and muffled. Luckily, they're just poorly encoded; and it is ENTIRELY possible to restore the audio back to 1:1 quality with the Dreamcast (for the most part).

At the bottom of this post you can see where I've restored just a single conversation between Ryo and Fuku-San. Unfortunately, due to some of the strange and poor choices that Sega and d3t made with these ports, the amount of work required to do several large portions of these is absolutely gargantuan. I didn't want to make a post about this until I was ready to fix everything in it's entirety, but my hand has been forced. Within the next few days, I should have some, or most of the cutscenes from disc 1 converted and ready to go for all of you; but I'm going to need help to do pretty much anything outside of cutscenes (and maybe some music, but my main focus is on voices).

Jump to around 40 seconds if you want to hear a line of the re-releases dialogue, immediately before it switches to a much nicer version.

 

[iyapol]

Amazing work! It sounds so, so, so much better, doesn't it? How are you able to do this?

 

[ner0]

I have trouble picking it up, may be the crappy sound card I'm using on this device and the cheap earphones.
I would love a sort of side-by-side comparison, meaning the same scene played with the current rerelease audio and then with your restoration. Keep it up!

 

[RiGoRmOrTiS]

It's the original audio files, they are just as bad on Dreamcast. There are some clipping issues that have not been patched on consoles, but on PC everything sounds as it did on Dreamcast for voices. It's telling you are only doing the cutscene voices... would I be right that you are recording voices from the Shenmue movie DVD which are from the original raw recordings.... Thats fine and all, but D3T haven't messed with the Dreamcast's original audio files.

 

[Dewey]

It's the original audio files, they are just as bad on Dreamcast.

No it isn't, and no they aren't.

but on PC everything sounds as it did on Dreamcast for voices.

No it doesn't

It's telling you are only doing the cutscene voices...

No it isn't.

would I be right that you are recording voices from the Shenmue movie DVD which are from the original raw recordings....

No you would not

Thats fine and all, but D3T haven't messed with the Dreamcast's original audio files.

yes they did.

I'm about to start getting ready for work, but long story short. Yes, they did mess with the original DC audio files. I didn't say I'm only doing cutscenes, just that those will be done first. Free roam voices are going to be much harder, just due to the sheer number of them (I mean, it's 12k files per disc in Shenmue 1 for FREE gameplay voices, and you have to go through 2 sets, so roughly 24k voice clips to be sorted through... per disc; goddamn insanity for one person, this is why I'm asking for help). I'm going to have to listen to them, transcribe them, then listen to the original recordings, transcribe them, compare the transcriptions, and then replace files. It's a mess.

Also, simple proof that they -DID- mess with the audio files? That fixed audio up above was fixed by using lossless copies of the DC audio. So yeah... they did mess with it.

 

[RiGoRmOrTiS]

So they changed the file format? I thought all the internal data files remained unchanged. I wonder if the original audio files were in a codec they no longer had a licence for so they had to convert them....

 

[Dewey]

So they changed the file format?

They did, and made some weird, bad, and dumb choices during that process.

I thought all the internal data files remained unchanged.

Sort of? It’s a mix of yes and no.

I wonder if the original audio files were in a codec they no longer had a licence for so they had to convert them....

Ehh, not quite. They just went from a both of a format to play on PC, to a shit format

 

[Verderame]

I was starting to believe that i was crazy to think that the Dreamcast games actually sounded way better.

 

[Joqu]

I really appreciate the work you're putting into this, and it'll probably end up being our only option to fix things, but I can't help but feel like we first should try to get d3t to patch these issues before undertaking such a gargantuan effort. Especially since the console players deserve high quality audio too.

I mean, we'll see how long it lasts but I do feel like they've been trying to fix things up with their PC patches (for now).

 

[ner0]

Maybe they figured

So they changed the file format? I thought all the internal data files remained unchanged. I wonder if the original audio files were in a codec they no longer had a licence for so they had to convert them....

I may be misremembering but I was under the impression that the Shenmue DC version used ADX audio codec, which from a web search returns that it's CRI Middleware proprietary. Certainly doesn't account for bad conversion, but when the "original" material is already low quality it's hard to get a decent end result.

 

[punkmanced]

I really appreciate the work you're putting into this, and it'll probably end up being our only option to fix things, but I can't help but feel like we first should try to get d3t to patch these issues before undertaking such a gargantuan effort. Especially since the console players deserve high quality audio too.

I mean, we'll see how long it lasts but I do feel like they've been trying to fix things up with their PC patches (for now).

I echo your sentiment.
The work you modders are doing is fantastic, but it might pay to wait a bit on this one. Perhaps save some of that strength for when D3T is "done" fixing the games' various audio issues?

In the meantime, we could all petition them to fix said issues, with emphasis on where the game is inferior to the Dreamcast originals (for ex).

 

[Faith]

To get an exact picture of how much worse the sound is in the PC version someone could extract an audio file of dialogue from the PC version and extract that same dialogue from the DC audio, then use a program called spek to make spectograms of each file and compare the results. I'd do it myself but I don't know anything about modding.

I wonder how much worse the Jap audio is compared to the DC version?

 

[Dewey]

To get an exact picture of how much worse the sound is in the PC version someone could extract an audio file of dialogue from the PC version and extract that same dialogue from the DC audio, then use a program called spek to make spectograms of each file and compare the results. I'd do it myself but I don't know anything about modding.

I wonder how much worse the Jap audio is compared to the DC version?

1) No need, it's plainly audible through listening; check the video above, but I'll gladly do that if anyone still wants to SEE just how bad it is

2) The Japanese audio (in Shenmue 1) isn't THAT much worse than DC. It's worse, but not bad enough that I can't play with it. English is just a mess though

3) Don't exactly want to talk about WHY on here, but I can all but guarantee they won't fix it. It actually kind of looks like they INTENTIONALLY shat all over the audio (as far as voices are concerned).

 

[cornchipz]

As we all know, the audio in the re-release of Shenmue 1+2 is well... garbage (at least for English, from what I've heard, Japanese sounds way better... In Shenmue). There's no way around it; voices sound horrible and muffled. Luckily, they're just poorly encoded; and it is ENTIRELY possible to restore the audio back to 1:1 quality with the Dreamcast (for the most part).

At the bottom of this post you can see where I've restored just a single conversation between Ryo and Fuku-San. Unfortunately, due to some of the strange and poor choices that Sega and d3t made with these ports, the amount of work required to do several large portions of these is absolutely gargantuan. I didn't want to make a post about this until I was ready to fix everything in it's entirety, but my hand has been forced. Within the next few days, I should have some, or most of the cutscenes from disc 1 converted and ready to go for all of you; but I'm going to need help to do pretty much anything outside of cutscenes (and maybe some music, but my main focus is on voices).

Jump to around 40 seconds if you want to hear a line of the re-releases dialogue, immediately before it switches to a much nicer version.

Alright, at first on Reddit I thought you were just talking smack about the game, but... you really can tell. So naturally, I came here, found your thread and... wow, that really is kind of crazy. Your proof of concept does sounds a lot better than the PC versions original dialogue track.

 

[Amir]

Wow! I've been playing with Japanese audio so haven't noticed too much of a difference, but great work! Curious, is the encoding for the Japanese audio on these re-releases than with the English audio? Wondering why the English audio sounds so much worse than its Dreamcast counterpart.

 

[Verderame]

I hope one day the Japanese audio can be fixed too.

 

[Dewey]

Alright, at first on Reddit I thought you were just talking smack about the game, but... you really can tell. So naturally, I came here, found your thread and... wow, that really is kind of crazy. Your proof of concept does sounds a lot better than the PC versions original dialogue track.

Yeah, Shenmue is far and away my favorite game of all time (except maybe for Shenmue II; but I really just count them as the same game). I noticed as soon as I heard the first line of dialogue, and I've been (slowly) working on this since; but now that I have all the groundwork in place, I can start ramping up for all cutscenes, depending on how fast I work, I should have that done anywhere between tomorrow night, and a month from now. For dialogue when the game is in FREE mode, which is the majority of it; I'm going to need help. The way it seems like it needs to be done, there's just too much for me to do as one person. I have a few ideas on ways to get around this absolutely insane amount of work; but I don't have much hope for any of them. I wasn't even going to post a thread here until I was ready to release at the very least, all of "Disc 1" of Shenmue 1; but I can't even do that much on my own.

Wow! I've been playing with Japanese audio so haven't noticed too much of a difference, but great work! Curious, is the encoding for the Japanese audio on these re-releases than with the English audio? Wondering why the English audio sounds so much worse than its Dreamcast counterpart.

Honestly, I'm a bit curious about that myself; but I haven't taken a look into it. I don't really want to say TOO much on here about why there are such severe problems (don't know who's watching, they may change things up, etc.), but if I had to take a guess, I would say the fact that I can fix the english audio, and the fact that japanese sounds better (again, in Shenmue 1, from the 10-ish minutes I played of Shenmue II in Japanese, it's just as bad there) are related.

 

[cornchipz]

Yeah, Shenmue is far and away my favorite game of all time (except maybe for Shenmue II; but I really just count them as the same game). I noticed as soon as I heard the first line of dialogue, and I've been (slowly) working on this since; but now that I have all the groundwork in place, I can start ramping up for all cutscenes, depending on how fast I work, I should have that done anywhere between tomorrow night, and a month from now. For dialogue when the game is in FREE mode, which is the majority of it; I'm going to need help. The way it seems like it needs to be done, there's just too much for me to do as one person. I have a few ideas on ways to get around this absolutely insane amount of work; but I don't have much hope for any of them. I wasn't even going to post a thread here until I was ready to release at the very least, all of "Disc 1" of Shenmue 1; but I can't even do that much on my own.

Bless you good sir. I am extremely interested in checking out your work on the cutscenes whenever you get finished with it. I still haven't really checked out the new patch today, so I'm curious to see what improvements were made to audio in the new update. I know none of that is going to fix the dialogue issues you're working with, but it would be nice to see some of the sampling issues get fixed.

 

[Dewey]

Just wanted to give a quick update. I still haven't done much converting; just a little tinkering, experimenting, and organizing even further. Think I have everything laid out in a sane fashion at this point. I managed to convert and insert the original notebook music, item collection chimes, and BGM from the intro sequence. It doesn't add MUCH back, but it's enough to make a difference; and my goal is rapidly shifting towards complete audio restoration wherever I can.

Also; I'd just like to note, that if all of this works out as I have planned, I should be able to convert the FREE audio quickly and easily. Seems one of my workarounds has some promise. Simply put I am now 100% certain I know exactly how they prepared the audio for the PC port, and can say they made a very deliberate choice to ruin the audio quality. In order to fix this, it seems I have to do roughly half of the work they did (plus a little bit just due to differences in workflow). In fact, I'm pretty certain I'll even be using some of the same tools.

 

[BlueMue]

How do you work with the format used in the rerelease? I was thinking about bringing over the DC audio too.
I have been posting much earlier how and why it sounds worse than the original and that I can do a lot cleaner file conversion myself.