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- by Sephirothkefka at 1:06 AM EDT on May 1, 2018
- @kode54 I use winamp myself NOT foobar. I assume it has its own upsampling algorithm?
- by nothingtosay at 2:23 PM EDT on May 2, 2018
- It actually doesn't. kode54 is the one who maintains the foobar USF player and added the upsampling to it. It's probably been a very long time since the Winamp plugin has been updated.
- by arbingordon at 6:28 PM EDT on May 2, 2018
- @kode54 - I disagree.
You can even make 16KHz 4-bit ADPCM recordings sound like a CD-quality track.
For example, you can use an exciter, which interpolates the low-to-mid range frequencies into the high range spectrum, or simply resample it with no interpolation, and manually filter out the aliased frequency bands.
Purely snake oil, nothing more.
- by simonmkwii at 10:28 AM EDT on May 3, 2018
- @arbingordon - Huh? Eh? Wha?
- by Sephirothkefka at 5:34 PM EDT on May 4, 2018
- @nothingtosay I mean Winamp's output plugin as a whole.
- by AnonRunzes at 8:51 PM EDT on May 4, 2018
- >Huh? Eh? Wha?
LOL nice meme
edited 8:51 PM EDT May 4, 2018
- by derselbst at 1:53 PM EDT on May 8, 2018
- You cannot improve sound quality by re-sampling or interpolating. The information is not there, it's lost. kode54 is absolutely correct.
The Ancient Lake "remastered" track is not of higher quality either. One can easily prove this by examining its spectrogram. Everything above 11000 Hz is mirrored. This is the aliasing effect. What we hear as high frequencies are ringing artifacts of the interpolation method used (cubic?). Using Whittaker–Shannon interpolation should avoid those artifacts and give you the same result as the console output, just at higher sample rate.
The only chance to get higher quality tunes is to re-synthesize them. Only possible for games that use sequenced audio ofc. Since the instrument samples are compressed themselves, the gain may be marginal. Doing this for DKR's Ancient Lake this looks / hears the following (using fluidsynth with 7th order sinc interpolation for all instrument samples):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=14XMTot2eI61DB4QiGk-D70Rs1TiW8CIG
- by SmartOne at 9:27 PM EDT on May 8, 2018
- Thank you, real quality. Wanna do the entire game, and the entire N64 library, and Donkey Kong Country 3 (GBA)?
Please.
- by nothingtosay at 4:06 PM EDT on May 11, 2018
- @derselbst: I think I get where you're coming from, which I believe is a scientific perspective of audio that prioritizes theoretical best practices and treats distortions as inherently undesirable. I fully understand the "rule" that you can't improve quality by resampling, the best you can do is minimize artifacts.
But I can't say quality can't be improved when, despite sound quality being an almost entirely subjective thing so there isn't any one correct answer, I think most people would agree that Diddy Kong Racing sounds better cubic interpolated (which is the way it sounds on real hardware because that's what real hardware does, contra your statement in the last sentence of your second paragraph) than with Whittaker–Shannon interpolation and lacking any frequencies above 11 kHz. Yes, they're aliasing artifacts, but that doesn't mean that they're unpleasant or that it sounds worse.
I like to add some distortion to my electric guitar sometimes, which creates overtones that aren't present in the pre-processed signal to achieve a desired sound; that's functionally equivalent to a Nintendo 64, GameCube, Wii, or PlayStation 2 upsampling with interpolation to create treble frequencies that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Evidently console designers have decided that resampling with interpolation methods (other than sinc) does improve sound quality because they've made the conscious decision to do just that.
Like I said in a previous post, sure it's not as good as natively using the higher sampling rate in the first place, so re-synthesizing should sound better as a general rule. But Star Fox 64 and Ocarina of Time's soundtrack albums seem to have been recorded pre-conversion to N64 and I really kinda prefer how they sound in the game.
- by MoldyPond at 5:51 PM EDT on May 11, 2018
- Don't even get me started on OoT and MM's CD's sounding worse than in-game.
I think the main problem with the arguments here is that the title asks to "improve" low-quality audio (which in and of itself is completely subjective). Just because you've taken a low-quality source and processed it to sound "better" doesn't mean it actually is. Data lost is data lost, no exceptions, but that also doesn't mean you can't make it sound better than the low-quality version.
I'd say the better argument here is Purist Audio Vs. Enhanced Audio.
In response to the original question, yes there are (many) ways to improve low-quality audio, but it raises the extra question of "Knowing that it's been processed externally by a random person with no affiliation to the original source material and this edit is not official in any way whatsoever, is that a concern to you at all?"
edited 5:52 PM EDT May 11, 2018
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