Why do XBOX music rips often sound so bad? by marcoxD95 at 10:15 AM EDT on August 22, 2020
It is really weird. I recently made many Soundtrack rips from various games and XBOX rips and they often (but not always) had very weird bad quality, despite being LOSSLESS XBOX WAVs most of the time. The audio is sometimes very loud and even "screams" at you with heights being absolutely destroying and killing the experience.
I am not sure if that is just how these files were encoded or if I did something wrong ripping them. Both Fallout 3 and Riddick Escape From Butcher Bay are glorious examples. The audio files have higher quality than their PC counterparts but they just sound awful. It would probably even hurt my experience when playing on the XBOX, that is how bad they are. Kinda weird when a MP3 128kbit from the PC version sounds better than the lossless wav from XBOX.
I just wanted to ask here if this is normal and known. Or if some of the rips floating around on this website are just bad and broken (or the tools used for ripping are). But I even tried to rip some stuff myself from xbox iso images but same result. Some games such as Riddick Assault On Dark Athena weirdly enough sound just as good or better than the PC files but it really seems to be a hit or miss.
Its also both with the XBOX and XBOX 360. I am really not sure why this happens. Either the rips are faulty or the developers failed at encoding their music into this xbox wav format.
That is a interesting point and perhaps true. I actually thought the audio is lossless because I took a look at the spectrums and it had audio information all the way up to 22000khz or 24000khz (48000khz stereo). After listening to my audio rip for Riddick Dark Athena I noticed that, like with all other rips, in silent parts there is a heavy compression artifact... So while the music itself sounds fine its also not perfect, compared to the lossy OGG PC files. Its really weird... And I wasted hours ripping XBOX games. I thought I just leave this here for others. Because it is NOT worth ripping XBOX games even if the spectrums look sound on paper. Guess I will just ignore XBOX versions for my future rips and focus on PC and perhaps Playstation but most of the time these platforms seem to use the same audio files, aside of the fact that PS has MP3, while PC has MP3s or OGGs usually. Maybe I am just too audiophile... No idea but the difference is really big to my ears.