Posted on: April 27, 2024
NM64
Verified ownerGames: 83 Reviews: 2
Good music; technological incompetence
Amusingly, this seems to be the opposite issue of the "Mhakna Gramura and Fairy Bell" OST where I like this music (has bonus songs!) but it's marred by technological incompetence. (savvy VN readers may notice my username as the audio person for the Fate/stay night Ultimate Edition fan-patch project) This OST of vorbis@Q9 at 119 minutes is sized to fit a music CD which is likely why (almost) all 48kHz music is resampled to 44.1kHz, but the first song is still 48kHz and vorbis@Q10 which negates any reason to resample the other 48kHz songs... (if they were going to downsample most of the songs anyway, why not apply some r128gain/replaygain/wave gain while they're at it?) Fidelity is mostly equal or lower than the data files used in the VN—maybe this OST was transcoded in some lossy--to-▶lossy manner, or a mediocre resampler was used. A key example is the song "The Divide"／"Lines are Drawn" in the right channel around sample 1447000 with an Audacity project of 48kHz; on the spectrogram view you'll see more detailed audio data on the in-game vorbis@Q5 files yet there's also gaps in the upper-range not present in the OST version. The real kicker is that a lossless 24bit 48kHz WAV of "Lines are Drawn" is (accidentally?) included in the VN's data files, allowing us to see how much audio information was originally present (Spoiler: quite a bit more) And the question of "why OGG vorbis"? We know lossless was available, and they didn't directly use the VN's OGG vorbis data files. Windows and Apple products don't support OGG vorbis out-of-the-box, so this nullifies the convenience factor of buying this for many less-savvy users that don't want to extract the music out of the RPA data files (and the VN is required to buy this DLC anyway!) The bonus song "999 - Modus Operandi" has notably worse dynamic range than the short version used in fault one.
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