Is VG Music Higher than 16-bit? by MoldyPond at 2:03 PM EDT on July 12, 2018
I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this, but technically speaking (I would assume *all*) VG music is only going to have a 16-bit bit depth at best right?
The formats in use generally either decode to 16 bit (from ADPCM), or decode to floating point (lossy with no real bit depth) and the floating point is converted when mixed.
I've never seen a game that had anything higher than uncompressed 16-bit LPCM, and I doubt anyone would do that since people still generally like to keep audio as small as reasonably possible. As you probably know, Nintendo (and many other people) regularly use 4-bit audio.
foobar2000 is not downsampling any of them, but VGMStream downsamples the output of MP3/Ogg Vorbis/Opus/WMA/Atrac3/plus/9 etc from floating point to 16 bit. You're not really losing anything by that conversion, though.
The codecs themselves use floating point, and I'm pretty sure that a number of modern games already use floating point for their internal mixing, and downmix to integer on output, unless the console library supports float as well. Floating point makes it easier to mix multiple streams without worrying too much about losing precision.