[Andrew]

Hey all.

So, one of my favourite things about the Sonic 1 2013 release is the remastered soundtrack. The improved DAC sound quality and the light improvements to the FM sounds (I think?) make a world of difference in my opinion. For that reason, I'm really looking forward to the Sonic 2 2013 release (hurry up!) for the soundtrack alone.

My question is, has someone already made an attempt at remastering any of the Mega Drive titles using a similar method? I.e. sticking with the original FM instruments, cleaner DAC samples? I've checked YouTube for remastered Sonic soundtracks and they often tend to be done in software where the instruments have been changed along with new drum kits/sfx. This isn't what I mean, although the Sonic 2 HD soundtrack is awesome!

Also, does anyone have any information about how the 2013 Sonic 1 release soundtrack was remastered? It'd be interesting to know. So generally, it's just a topic about remastered Mega Drive Sonic titles.

Thanks all!

[XCubed]

I just took a journey over to youtube....how in the world was the hi-hat really like that from the beginning?? Sounds amazing, but like others said, the "high quality" high hat, is a bit distracting.

[Koquillion]

I attempted something along these lines shortly before the Android Sonic 1 came out.

I ripped all the individual tracks from a vgm of the Sonic 1 Staff Roll (5 FMs, 3 PSG (2 Tone, 1 Noise), 1 DAC).

Took a snare sample from the original sonic 1 demo soundtracks, sped it up to match the pitch of the in-game dac snare as close as possible,

Then using this with other kick & timpani samples built into the Mixcraft software, I rebuilt my own "clean" versions of the drum tracks, manually. Added a slight stereo pan to the PSG Tone tracks. Then wrote out to the finished "remastered" wav file. Didn't sound half bad.

Will upload if I can find my old files, but it's currently sitting on an abandoned hard drive in a broken laptop unfortunately.

I assume this is probably quite similar to what was done for the actual Android version. But I can't work out for the life of me what they've done to the PSG tracks, they sound almost too clean.

This post has been edited by Koquillion: 25 November 2013 - 01:32 PM

[Andrew]

Yeah that sounds pretty much like exactly what I was on about, Koquillion. As an example I've quickly thrown an MP3 of Scrap Brain Zone together where I flick between the MegaDrive and portable release versions of the soundtrack.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/hlys4n

[Hendricks 266]

Koquillion, on 24 November 2013 - 09:29 PM, said:

I ripped all the individual tracks from a vgm

You're probably better off using ValleyBell's smps2mid tool to extract the exact music data from the ROM.

[Koquillion]

Hendricks 266, on 25 November 2013 - 05:20 PM, said:

You're probably better off using ValleyBell's smps2mid tool to extract the exact music data from the ROM.

Not sure how that really helps with the purpose here, it makes the drum transcribing a bit easier, but only for the kick/snare positions, not really helpful if you want to preserve the actual "Mega Drive" sound of the other instruments. The only use I can see for this is if you want to make your own cover version with different instruments.

With the VGM file going through a plugin in winamp you can output all the original clean MD instruments to separate wav files. Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something, Sonic hacking is not my strongpoint.