Mario Kart 8 Frontrunning Channels? by Kurausukun at 6:02 PM EST on January 10, 2015
So I was just curious about this, and I wondered if anyone else knew how it worked; in MK8, if you're well in first place, a little drum track is added to the song. In the original streams, it's its own little mono stream that the game turns on and off my question is this: if I simply downmix the streams in an audio program, the drum track is way too loud and overpowers the music, but ingame it sounds fine and more subdued. Is this just my ears playing tricks on me, or does the game itself alter the volume of the streams somehow?
Oh, that's cool. I remember Brawl also had volume settings for individual songs in the .brsar. How far are we from having a program like BrawlBox to look at .bfsar info? I'd rather know the exact levels than try to do it by ear.
Hint. Don't down mix them to mono. Make them stereo. The reason is this. The left side is the same as the right side, right? So, therefore, the volume will be the same. But if you down mix it to mono, then it will be twice as loud.
Basically... 1 dB left + 1 db right = 1 db mono 1 db mono + 1 db mono = 2 db mono
They're supposed to be stereo (that is 2 channels). Just remember... "stereo" means two channels. It doesn't necessarily mean the channels will be different.
I know. That IS what I do. The two channels aren't the same either way, they're meant to be stereo. Even then, they're too loud for the main music, but soneek's explanation makes sense--I just didn't know the game had volume settings inside the bfsar, which is why I hope soneek (or someone else) makes more headway into it.
I will not be looking at anything for quite a while. It's even harder since there's no easy way to replace Wii U files and test this kind of thing. Hopefully someone else will have time to work on such things.
We do know them now, but sadly I have no fucking idea where the information went. I believe it was soneek who posted it, but I don't remember if it was on here or over IRC. I think it was a pastebin, but I don't know for sure since I didn't bookmark it for some reason. I thought I had a downloaded copy, but I guess not. If soneek sees this, he can clarify, but apparently he's pretty busy lately.
Hey, nice job. I know the issue's kind of resolved, but would you mind telling me where it was? After you mentioned it, I was wracking my brain to remember where it was posted.
I found it in Wii U thread, just searching hist lastest posts in forum. But to be true, i'm not sure how this values work, some explanation would be very helpful.
BTW, he said he also took a look for multichannel streams in Maker, but I haven't found anything about it. Such information exist?
Oh, sorry for figuring you would know that. Basically, the volume is an 8-bit signed value, but negative values aren't useful for us, so we consider the values 0-127. 0 is "silent" and 127 is "full volume," or the actual level of the audio file. It's easiest in this case to think of the values as a percentage. If we consider 127 100% and 0 0%, we can calculate the necessary amplification for any of the streams (for example, if we have a volume value of 103 for a stream, we would want to find out what percent 103 is of 127, and then apply that percent of amplification to the stream; this means that all the amplification we do will either do nothing or make the stream quieter). If you don't know how to calculate percentages or just can't be bothered, this site will do it for you (we would be using the second option in this case). However, this is a bit annoying for audio since decibels work on a logarithmic scale, so percents don't handily correspond to values. You could use calculators or some other way to figure out the value you want, but if you're editing in Audacity, then you can use this plugin, which will do all the hard work for you (put it in your Audacity install directory under Audacity/Plug-Ins. You'll also need to make sure to choose the second one in the drop-down menu since there's a built-in function that's also called amplify).