Quick 64th Note question by AndrewB at 12:23 AM EDT on June 27, 2005
Is there any reason why it can't do upsampling? For example, ZSNES (SNES emulator) can "upsample" its sound quality to 44100hz or even 48000hz with noticible improvements. Basically, this makes a difference because any time a high note is hit, the frequency goes up so the change is noticible. But 64th note caps the frequency at whatever the native sound mode of the game is (for example, 16000hz for Banjo Kazooie, 24000hz for Mario Golf 64, 32000hz for Zelda 64).
If somehow 64th Note could upsample the N64 music the way ZSNES does for Super NES games, that would be sweet.
The difference is that the audio generation is in software, not hardware. When you're simulating hardware you can generate it at as high a resolution as you want. 64th Note only has control of the resolution after the software has already generated every sample. You could do some interpolation but I'd rather not mess with that, and there are output plugins to do it for you. Typically an N64 game has a single call to the osAiSetFrequency function early in it's execution, and the return value from that is fed into the synthesis software to match the rate properly. It is theoretically possible to modify this before making the rip, but it isn't the sort of thing 64th Note can do automatically.
Then there's the principle of the thing. USF is meant to be used to reproduce the game's music accurately. As blargg so rightly put it: My main goal was accurate reproduction of the original console's sound without the aliasing so commonly heard in sound emulators. Apparently inaccurate reproduction has become the benchmark in many places where the original console's sound is unheard of. Now this doesn't exactly apply to N64 sound generation, but the fact remains that when you go changing the sample rate, cranking up the synth rate or doing interpolation, you're taking a step away from accurate reproduction.
There's a winamp plugin that allows you to upsample the output. I've used it to change the rate to 44.1 before converting the tracks to waves. Worked great.
Oh my bad. I assumed people could figure out how to look up the output plugins page on the winamp site. Sometimes you have to actually "look" if you want to find something...
Since with the SNES is hardware emulation (emulating the SNES APU) you can do all kinds of stuff like turn different instruments on and off, adjust the tempo and pitch as well as control the sample rate. Since there was an APU on the SNES (unlike on the N64, I think) the sound was handled the same from game to game and being able to dump the APU's RAM makes ripping songs from SNES games a crapload easier than N64.