What to do with two mono channels for the same song? by James at 5:54 AM EDT on July 13, 2012
I used vgmtoolbox to extract the ADPCM out of Fat Princess' (PS3) .qrk files and now find myself with raw files that work fine using GENH but I'm not sure how to go about putting the channels together correctly...unless I'm totally doing this wrong in the first place. lol
It doesn't sound quite right when putting one channel on the left and the other on the right. Sorry if I'm totally coming off noobish but I was hoping to join the tracker with something to contribute at the least.
With Metroid Prime, it has 2 mono tracks for each track but when I converted to WAV, they were both stereo. If you only wanted them stereo but not necessarily in the original format, output the files as WAV, then if they're mono, open both files in Audacity, then click on the menu on the top track, and select Make Stereo.
Sorry if I'm totally coming off noobish but I was hoping to join the tracker with something to contribute at the least.
Don't worry about "bringing something to the party," although it is nice of you to try.
As far as the contents of the tracker, however, it is preferred that you only upload the original tracks, GENH'd if needed, but not some sort of "home brewed" stereo tracks. Of course, if you are using vgmstream's feature of adding _L (for left channel) and _R (for right channel) to two different file names, that is perfectly fine for uploading to the tracker. For example BGM1_R.genh, BGM1_L.genh.
With Metroid Prime (and many other games), the files have a specific naming convention. VGMstream recognizes this naming convention, and automatically (in real-time) combines the 2 separate mono files during playback, to result in stereo output. So, if you convert the (correctly named) mono files to WAV, of course they'll were stereo. That's how VGMstream does things.
That said, theoretically you could get VGMstream to automatically combine 2 mono files by renaming them to follow the expected naming convention (as snakemeat said, adding "_L" and "_R" to the respecting file's names. Or "_0" and "_1" might work as well?). However, I think VGMstream has a few checks in place, to make sure that it does not incorrectly combine files (I think they have to have an identical number of samples, for example).
However, your best option would be to upload some files, so that others can look at them, and decide what, exactly, is needed to get them to play correctly.
Obviously, I'm not really much help here, but I thought I should mention that VGMstream does have a method in place to handle dual-mono files, to result in stereo. Maybe you can find a use for that? Mouser X over and out.
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone! I would upload the .qrk files myself but they're pretty big (about 4-500mb combined), I probably should've just upped them overnight (which I may as well do tonight).
For the time being, I uploaded a couple of them, so if anyone has an idea on what I should be doing with these, it would be greatly appreciated!