drmasteringdude
12-04-2013, 07:49 AM
Greetings fellow FFShrine members!
This is my first thread/post and I thought that this would be a great way to get a head start on getting to know everybody here!
I had been searching for a good rip of Spyro the Dragon's soundtrack for a while now. I found a bunch online but none were of the quality that I would put onto my iPod. If you don't like mine, by all means don't use it. Since audio is one of my hobbies (I am no professional) I wanted to make use of my skills for others to make them happy.
I dug through a bunch of boxes in my room and found an old Spyro the Dragon disk (The first one) for Playstation 1 that was in good condition. I did a ton of research and figured out how to rip the audio. It wasn't easy, but I extracted 40 songs from the original disk and remastered the audio. (This is a US version and I couldn't find anymore songs, so I'm assuming that I ripped every song in the soundtrack and that this is complete)
Here's the download (Stewart Copeland - Spyro the Dragon Original Soundtrack (2013 Remaster) (http://www.mediafire.com/download/2zm0mrelok38xpv/Stewart+Copeland+-+Spyro+the+Dragon+Original+Soundtrack+%282013+Rema ster%29.rar)) for you to snatch up.
I also made my own album art for it which I give myself points for because I don't use imaging software often.
All files are tagged as well and ready for whatever device or program you want to play it on.
Download size: 146.93mb Extracted size: 134mb
(I added a 15% recovery in the .rar just so nobody gets a bad copy somehow)
Throughout the process, I had in mind 2 things.
1. What the original musicians wanted the music to sound like. I spent quite a good time listening to each and every track and trying to understand the sound that they were trying to get and how I could make changes to the audio that would match their artistic style. I believe that all audio engineering should be done to only compliment the audio more and improve it's over-all quality to professional levels. (I am not a professional but I strive to be)
2. That this soundtrack was going to be optimized for portable use but still retaining high quality audio. Each track was mastered with an AAC encoder emulator on so that I knew exactly how each track was going to sound once I had compressed it. (I didn't master the tracks with it on. I removed it before processing the actual audio) I have done ton of research on the new QuickTime AAC encoder that features the new True Variable Bit-rate feature. I know a lot of people get angry about compressed audio, but hear me out. The new encoder has almost unlimited bit-rate. It can go all the way down to 1kbps up to 500kbps. (With Metallica's Death Magnetic it peaked at about 500kbps) Most people say, what is so good about this?
Well; The new AAC version has almost 5 times the quality of mp3. What I mean is, if you compare the removed audio of an mp3 at the same bit-rate as the AAC, the AAC audio not only sounds like white noise, it doesn't remove transients and musical data. The mp3 audio has that flange to it that makes compressed audio hated. It also removes a lot of the transients as well as musical data. The fact that you cannot comprehend what the AAC TVBR encoder is removing because it's all noise and crackles & pops which means that you are left with only music. You aren't losing important data by compressing the audio.
The remasted album has been encoded at the perfect balance point of quality and size. It's extremely portable, yet is mastered for AAC. It is completely transparent compression. By transparent I mean that if you take the original lossless files and reverse the phase and load in a compressed file, the original lossless file will cancel out the audio that was in the compressed file that is still part of the original, you get only the removed audio which was deleted in the compression. I tweaked my compression settings with various compressors and the one that I used for this soundtrack only removed, what seemed to be noise and crackles and pops. I did not hear any music at all in the removed audio and I am confident that you will hear absolutely no artifacts of compression of any kind. The audio also has been encoded at 48khz sample rate on the finished product. The audio files that were compressed were 44khz SR, but all the internal remastering and processing was done at 88khz. The audio was also resampled for 44khz after all the mastering was done, as not to loose data by simply cutting it off going from 88khz to 44khz. The idea behind the 48khz AAC is that the encoder's cut-off frequency is higher at higher sample rates. Meaning there will not be the typical 16khz cutoff that mp3s have at 128k bit-rate and other audio compression encoders use. Instead the higher and important frequencies are kept and there is not the typical "muffled" sound people get with mp3s.
If you think that the compression "killed" the audio, I ask you to take a look at the spectrum. It rolls off the audio (as opposed to cutting like other encoders) at 18khz as opposed to mp3's 16khz or the old aac version which is also 16khz. (At the same bit-rates, 128k)
Some of the processed that went into remastering the audio; ripping the audio, resampling the audio to regain the higher frequencies (the source was 32khz SR), de-poping, de-clicking, de-clipping, EQ, multi-band dynamic compression & gating, mastering reverb, harmonic excitation, stereo imaging (half of the original files were in mono and half in stereo), and limiting (that includes making sure every track is the same volume throughout the soundtrack) & dithering. The total amount of time spent on this project was about 1 week's worth spread out over 2 months of off and on, documented & painstaking processes/work.
This was super fun to learn and to do. I really love audio and I hope to be a professional someday.
I hope you download it, take a listen, compare it to whatever other version you have of the soundtrack, and comment on here with your opinion of it. (Personally, after 2 years of more learning and experience, I feel that it is a little on the light and sparkly-side of tones, but I really dig it on headphones with recessed treble, the tone is very vibrant and transparent. I feel it really is how the artists felt that it should sound, but they mastered the originals to be more of a muted and lush treble and boosted and distorted bass. It could have been the monitors they were using...)
This release as-is really does make this project shine the way it should have when they put it on the game disk. It's made to be listened to with the way it comes downloaded. It's made to be played on all kinds of devices. I don't have the original FLAC files.
Enjoy! :)
This is my first thread/post and I thought that this would be a great way to get a head start on getting to know everybody here!
I had been searching for a good rip of Spyro the Dragon's soundtrack for a while now. I found a bunch online but none were of the quality that I would put onto my iPod. If you don't like mine, by all means don't use it. Since audio is one of my hobbies (I am no professional) I wanted to make use of my skills for others to make them happy.
I dug through a bunch of boxes in my room and found an old Spyro the Dragon disk (The first one) for Playstation 1 that was in good condition. I did a ton of research and figured out how to rip the audio. It wasn't easy, but I extracted 40 songs from the original disk and remastered the audio. (This is a US version and I couldn't find anymore songs, so I'm assuming that I ripped every song in the soundtrack and that this is complete)
Here's the download (Stewart Copeland - Spyro the Dragon Original Soundtrack (2013 Remaster) (http://www.mediafire.com/download/2zm0mrelok38xpv/Stewart+Copeland+-+Spyro+the+Dragon+Original+Soundtrack+%282013+Rema ster%29.rar)) for you to snatch up.
I also made my own album art for it which I give myself points for because I don't use imaging software often.
All files are tagged as well and ready for whatever device or program you want to play it on.
Download size: 146.93mb Extracted size: 134mb
(I added a 15% recovery in the .rar just so nobody gets a bad copy somehow)
Throughout the process, I had in mind 2 things.
1. What the original musicians wanted the music to sound like. I spent quite a good time listening to each and every track and trying to understand the sound that they were trying to get and how I could make changes to the audio that would match their artistic style. I believe that all audio engineering should be done to only compliment the audio more and improve it's over-all quality to professional levels. (I am not a professional but I strive to be)
2. That this soundtrack was going to be optimized for portable use but still retaining high quality audio. Each track was mastered with an AAC encoder emulator on so that I knew exactly how each track was going to sound once I had compressed it. (I didn't master the tracks with it on. I removed it before processing the actual audio) I have done ton of research on the new QuickTime AAC encoder that features the new True Variable Bit-rate feature. I know a lot of people get angry about compressed audio, but hear me out. The new encoder has almost unlimited bit-rate. It can go all the way down to 1kbps up to 500kbps. (With Metallica's Death Magnetic it peaked at about 500kbps) Most people say, what is so good about this?
Well; The new AAC version has almost 5 times the quality of mp3. What I mean is, if you compare the removed audio of an mp3 at the same bit-rate as the AAC, the AAC audio not only sounds like white noise, it doesn't remove transients and musical data. The mp3 audio has that flange to it that makes compressed audio hated. It also removes a lot of the transients as well as musical data. The fact that you cannot comprehend what the AAC TVBR encoder is removing because it's all noise and crackles & pops which means that you are left with only music. You aren't losing important data by compressing the audio.
The remasted album has been encoded at the perfect balance point of quality and size. It's extremely portable, yet is mastered for AAC. It is completely transparent compression. By transparent I mean that if you take the original lossless files and reverse the phase and load in a compressed file, the original lossless file will cancel out the audio that was in the compressed file that is still part of the original, you get only the removed audio which was deleted in the compression. I tweaked my compression settings with various compressors and the one that I used for this soundtrack only removed, what seemed to be noise and crackles and pops. I did not hear any music at all in the removed audio and I am confident that you will hear absolutely no artifacts of compression of any kind. The audio also has been encoded at 48khz sample rate on the finished product. The audio files that were compressed were 44khz SR, but all the internal remastering and processing was done at 88khz. The audio was also resampled for 44khz after all the mastering was done, as not to loose data by simply cutting it off going from 88khz to 44khz. The idea behind the 48khz AAC is that the encoder's cut-off frequency is higher at higher sample rates. Meaning there will not be the typical 16khz cutoff that mp3s have at 128k bit-rate and other audio compression encoders use. Instead the higher and important frequencies are kept and there is not the typical "muffled" sound people get with mp3s.
If you think that the compression "killed" the audio, I ask you to take a look at the spectrum. It rolls off the audio (as opposed to cutting like other encoders) at 18khz as opposed to mp3's 16khz or the old aac version which is also 16khz. (At the same bit-rates, 128k)
Some of the processed that went into remastering the audio; ripping the audio, resampling the audio to regain the higher frequencies (the source was 32khz SR), de-poping, de-clicking, de-clipping, EQ, multi-band dynamic compression & gating, mastering reverb, harmonic excitation, stereo imaging (half of the original files were in mono and half in stereo), and limiting (that includes making sure every track is the same volume throughout the soundtrack) & dithering. The total amount of time spent on this project was about 1 week's worth spread out over 2 months of off and on, documented & painstaking processes/work.
This was super fun to learn and to do. I really love audio and I hope to be a professional someday.
I hope you download it, take a listen, compare it to whatever other version you have of the soundtrack, and comment on here with your opinion of it. (Personally, after 2 years of more learning and experience, I feel that it is a little on the light and sparkly-side of tones, but I really dig it on headphones with recessed treble, the tone is very vibrant and transparent. I feel it really is how the artists felt that it should sound, but they mastered the originals to be more of a muted and lush treble and boosted and distorted bass. It could have been the monitors they were using...)
This release as-is really does make this project shine the way it should have when they put it on the game disk. It's made to be listened to with the way it comes downloaded. It's made to be played on all kinds of devices. I don't have the original FLAC files.
Enjoy! :)