SNES audio

My understanding of it is that chip tunes are from hardware synths and not ROMplers so yeah your understanding is the same as mine. As for the SNES producing it's own sounds, hopefully someone can answer that because I'm curious if it does and if true what games do.

 

SNES plays back samples stored in a compressed form called BRR. There are eight playback channels, and each can be swapped out with a traditional noise channel if you so choose. You can read up on the full capabilities of the chip by looking for technical documentation on the chip (I'm using Anomie's S-DSP Doc as a technical reference for something secret ).

As for whether or not SNES music qualifies as chiptunes, I'm not going to argue sides here, though from what I can tell for the time being when most people think of chiptunes they usually think of square wave music (NES, GB, C64, etc. or just using instruments that sound like the above but are not made on that hardware).

 

I always kind of figured that SNES music was basically like music modules (XM, IT, MOD etc) - except it was very limited in the amount of sample space you got, so the samples were frequently compressed heavily, leading to that "muffled" sound criticism that occasionally gets thrown around.

 

That "muffled" sound is actually a low-pass filter applied to the overall sound output; most SNES music is very similar to MOD/XM/etc stuff, and the LPF is applied to smooth out some of the treble "crackly" artifacts that can occur.

Seconding this; partially because I always kinda associate "chiptune" with audio being created from a chip, as opposed to using samples... but you can't control how things get construed as they gain wider popularity/audience.

 

Huh, interesting. Makes me wonder what SNES music would sound like without that filter, even if the result was apparently deemed undesirable by the people who made it.

 

Technically the whole chiptune moniker originates from the Amiga MODs, which played back 4 channel sampled music.

What you are thinking of is not chiptune but FM.

 

I just simply define chip tune as anything that uses a microchip(s) to reproduce a performace by a stream of notes and controllers (may require the actual hardware to faithfully reproduce the performace), regardless if it's FM, or sample-based, or sqaure-based. I define streaming audio as anything that was recorded as a wave form in the studio and compressed or stored in a format that takes a steady stream to reproduce the end result and doesn't need the original hardware once a decoder is written to reproduce accuritely.

Chiptune: Genesis, (some SEGA CD tunes), 32X, Super Nintendo, etc. Any modern console's sound format that similar to MIDI such as the Playstation Sound Format
Streaming (not a chiptune): redbook audio, adx, etc.

Games that use chiptunes by my defination of a true chiptune: majority of Sonic Shuffle's score, Sonic CD (Past)
Example of a game using streaming audio, not a chiptune by my defination: Sonic Adventure (1&2), Sonic R, Saturn version of Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic Shuffle's score during a MPEG movie, Sonic CD (present, good future, bad future), etc.

 

Get the SNESamp plugin for Winamp/XMPlay and try out some SPCs. The options let you disable the filter, or even change the filter type. In fact it lets you modify the sound output in a variety of ways.

 

Because I've always been a bit confused on this as well

Is it a coincidence then that a lot of SNES music sounds the same? I've never been a fan of this instrument but yet it seems to turns up in tons of SNES games (for example). Was this from some standard library supplied by Nintendo or am I getting this compeltely wrong

 

I've always hated the SNES's muffled sound and oft-reused samples. The console would've sounded much better if more devs used more unique samples, and if Nintendo had found a better solution to artifacts from using uninterpolated samples. I would have preferred crisp, if not slightly buzzing sound over muffled soft crap. It just takes away from any "oomph" a dramatic sting may have had because it sounds like you're underwater.

 

I'm pretty sure ZSNES lets you lets you turn off any and all filters and interpolation for the sound and just listen to the instruments raw.

My definition is much the same, but broader. If it's a sequenced piece of music being played back on a single synthesizer or rompler, be it hardware or software-based, it's a chiptune.

 

I guess removing the low-pass filter would just result in a clearer sound with weaker bass... But I think the sound interpolation might be something more relevant to the unique way the SNES music sounds.


If I remember correctly, when disabling sound interpolation, some of the instruments (I'm guessing those not sample-based) will sound more like they're coming from a Game Boy Advance (think those buzzing sounds in the Sonic Advance music).


...This makes me wonder how would the Game Boy Advance games sound like with those SNES filters and interpolation applied, specially on top of the clear samples you can hear when extracting the songs to MIDI format.


(Edited since I had skipped a few posts accidentally)

 

Muffledness is a side effect of the interpolation method used on the samples during playback. Filtering done as part of BRR compression is not the most significant cause. I would love to get a cloned SPC with interpolation removed, I'll much rather hear aliasing artifacts than something coming underwater or through a pillow. That still won't fix all the looping problems half the games have...

As for chiptuneness, it is a style of music, it does not and should not have to be tied to hardware to qualify as being such. I don't consider anything I do as chipmusic even thouh it comes out various chips. By that logic most of the electronic music is chip music due to being all synth generated. Chipmusic to me is the mainly squarewaves based stuff... the Gameboy, NES, SMS, Atari etc. I'll now go back to making sweet italo on the YM chips :P

 

Wow. Just from reading the topic, the SNES audio format finally makes sense; an XM style format with samples. I always wondered why all of my favorite games had very different sounds to them.

As for the interpolation, I can kinda relate there. While playing Super Street Fighter II on SNEmulDS on the DS, it probably doesn't have that interpolation as far as I know, so the sound effects and music are crystal clear, (The music sounds a lot better that way.) but when I played it on ZSNES, (Which I later realized had filtering.) I was wondering what the heck was wrong with the sound. It was fairly muffled and compressed.

 

I like just putting on a cubic interpolation through highly advanced (in_gsf), which has pretty comparable sound quality to the we-don't-need-no-stinkin-interrupts performance via midi+soundfont, and has the advantage of not needing a media player that's not winamp.

 

So if SNES audio is sample-based, and GBA audio is sample-based, what excuse did Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2 have for sounding so completely awful? I'm fairly certain they didn't use the same samples.

 

The GBA doesn't have very good DAC, to my understanding. I forget if that's because it doesn't have a proper sound chip, forcing the CPU to handle audio duty, or if it's a memory issue limiting the size of samples, or if I'm completely off-base with my knowledge.

 

GBA isn't sample based: it's two PCM streams and all the work has to be done in software (though you can also use the original Game Boy audio hardware as well). I can't explain the poor quality choices by devs.