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- by cooljacker at 9:05 PM EDT on November 4, 2011
- Without going into complex stuff (because I don't have great knowledge anyhow), converting lossy game files into lossless is completely useless. Games so rarely use a native lossless format, and then it would have a purpose, but this way no.
I get the rippers nowadays almost always provide a flac version of their rip even if it's not necessary. They have logic like this: I want to losslessly encode original game streams, because that is so cool. What they forget is the SOURCE FILE. Why would you do that when the game streams are lossy, and sometimes very lossy? What would you have from doing that apart from huge files? The sound data is lost the moment when game creators compressed the streams and there's not a chance the lossless transcoding will "restore" you that data.
The best choice, in my opinion, for transcoding lossy game sound files is using ogg at q10. That is absolutely the greatest quality for a lossy codec you'll ever need. Sometimes mp3 is enough too, if the origimal files are more compressed aka even more lossy.
To break it down like this:
Would you take an mp3 and transcode it to flac? HELL NO!!
The same goes for almost all game formats, they are 95% of the time lossy, so for instance, transcoding ADX to flac is also useless (ADX, AIX, AAX, they are all lossy too).
The point is you have to know whether the original game stream is lossy or not, if it is lossy, don't make lossless transcodes, no matter how cool it may look like.
edited 9:19 PM EDT November 4, 2011
- by cooljacker at 9:13 PM EDT on November 4, 2011
- And to add some examples where you actually have original lossless game streams: there is a lossless variant of wma, a lossless variant of atrac (but even normal lossy atrac is a pain to decode)also as Mouser X said sometimes the game uses wav, pcm for audio and so on. But again, that situation is very, very rare.
edited 9:22 PM EDT November 4, 2011
- by bxaimc at 10:08 PM EDT on November 4, 2011
- Yay! someone gets it! :D
- by hcs at 10:10 PM EDT on November 4, 2011
- The point is to avoid introducing any more loss. A concern is that mismatches between the transforms and psychoacoustic models could compound into a loss greater than the sum of the component losses. This may be fine for you (and I regularly transcode lossy stuff to Vorbis myself when needed), but the kind of people who spend a lot of time perfecting their tagged, timed, mixed, etc. rips tend towards perfectionism.
- by neo_chip at 5:30 PM EDT on November 5, 2011
- Wow I've been waaaay off. I myself have been making rips straight to flac but thats because I had no idea the majority of the rips were even lossy and that vgmstream converted these straight to pcm.
Thanks cooljacker for clearing this up for me. :epicfacepalm:
Now these are streams we're talking, what about sequenced music? From my understanding, its basically lossless right?
- by cooljacker at 6:10 PM EDT on November 5, 2011
- No worries man, It's better to understand the concept at some point, and I appreciate your efforts as a ripper, OrangeC should be happy to have such great people by his side, in ripping bussiness I mean :D
Sequenced music is a different story, I think. No streams there, sound chip produces the music by reading correct sequence and instruments, so yes, that would be lossless, the melody is made 'on the fly' so to speak.
- by punk7890 at 8:39 PM EDT on November 5, 2011
- Sequence music from the PlayStation 1 & 2, and DS are all 4-bit ADPCM with different frequencies. Not exactly lossless. Same with SNES sequences. They also vary but are PCM I believe.
- by SmartOne at 8:52 PM EDT on November 5, 2011
- But the mixture of these samples results in audio that must be preserved. Tracker tunes decode to raw PCM no matter the sample formats.
All sound produced from your computer was first converted to PCM (maybe excluding the PC speaker).
- by hcs at 12:49 AM EDT on November 6, 2011
- It's the same argument as for using lossless for rips from (lossy) streams. If the decoder is implemented accurately, you have a perfect representation of what the game would produce.
- by cooljacker at 11:33 AM EST on November 6, 2011
- So, based on the fact the samples (or rather instruments) are lossy, even the sequenced music, as a combination of these samples, could be considered as lossy?
Interesting, not once thought about this, never was into ripping sequenced music, no wonder...
But what if all the samples are lossless? Would the resulting melody be lossless too, in this case?
edited 11:36 AM EST November 6, 2011
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