DSF track identification / tagging project

(Modding and other series related projects)

DSF track identification / tagging project

Postby NamelessLegacy » Tue May 08, 2012 4:27 pm

This is a project I've worked on and off for about the past 1 1/2 years: a fully tagged and timed DSF release of the Shenmue I and II BGM - essentially a more nerdy variant of the same thing Ziming is working on right now with this soundtrack uploads. That is, a "lossless" and multi-channel release with lots of metadata at a fraction of the file size, at the cost of player support and with the occasional emulation glitch.

In the last few days, I helped Ziming a bit with identifying some tracks for his soundtrack uploads, and the tag lists I've compiled came in quite handy. Thus, I'm now posting them publicly. Since they don't cover every DSF file yet, they may now also serve as a central point for the identification (and naming) of the remaining tracks. Some of those are probably so obscure that the only way to identify them is to replay the games and closely monitor every music change... something I don't have time for right now. :sad:

>>> Shenmue 1/2 DSF track identification and tagging lists <<<

These should at least cover all BGM tracks that are posted on Ziming's channel now (minus a few I might have overlooked). I opened that document for free editing, so if you want to help me with identifying, please don't hesitate. :)

DSF downloads
Since there seems to be no "100% complete" DSF release and Ziming sent me quite a few new files, I've uploaded everything I have to my server. Please tell me if I'm still missing anything! For example, I haven't found the firewood searching track yet.

Some notes about these lists:
  • All of these were manually timed (and yes, this really has been a lot of busywork). Since the Shenmue DSFs use the DPTK driver, I haven't found any "easy" solution to time those automatically - and I guess if there was any, the rippers would have just timed the files themselves. Still, if this may be possible after all and some of the modders here could explain or give me a hint on how to facilitate automatic timing, I'd be very grateful. (I can program, but I don't understand ARM7 assembly...yet)
  • For the most part, the track names follow those on Ziming's channel. Lately, I've begun to note down variations in the comment field.
  • Composer information is applied where available.
  • OST titles always take precedence over Ziming's titles.
  • If two tracks are slightly different but essentially the same composition, they share the same title - I myself don't care about subtle differences or variations. Those are pointed out in the comment field.

Future plans:
  • This project didn't start out that serious (I just wanted to have a few tracks tagged and then it just became more and more...). Thus, the timing on some tracks, especially from Shenmue I, is fairly inconsistent. Will fix this in the future.
  • A lot of tracks are glitched with the current foobar2000 foo_input_aodsf plugin (missing instruments or reverb effects or sounding very distorted). Since many (but not all) play flawlessly through the final version of Audio Overload (which seems to be the most up-to-date DSF player), I'll eventually port that one to foobar2000 in the course of this project.
  • The streamed .adx and .genh files will be added once I developed a way to tag them. Probably something involving writing Vorbis comments to an external file in the same directory.
  • A sheet for What's Shenmue.
NamelessLegacy
Fuku-san
Fuku-san
 
Joined: August 2011
Favorite title: Shenmue II

Re: DSF track identification / tagging project

Postby Master Kyodai » Wed May 09, 2012 8:25 am

A pretty nice overview, the list is good to look up a specific track.

Personally I am not the biggest fan of DSF, ADX and GENH as they are all very proprietary and obscure formats barely supported by ANY player. Probably much better than the original DTPK sequenced format, but for the end user far from practical. As you noticed the only halfway practical way is to play them with foobar 2000 and the AO plugins and still many are glitched. I'd vouch for a 192K MP3 release instead as that can be played by virtually every player and device. If it has to be lossless I would suggest Ogg Vorbis.

What you said about the "final version of audio overload" is interesting, but the SDK you linked to is again something the general public can do absolutely nothing with, so I am looking forward to your port if that fixes some of the glitched tracks.


What i also noticed is that you also included "ambient" files for What's Shenmue. If i remember right then there was at least 1 ambient file with a music track in Shenmue 2 that i stumbled across, i think it was the shenmue theme played on a chinese fiddle or so. Ziming will remember that one.



And as a side note - a (very) few tracks are also on the discs as CD-Audio tracks, I'd also include these as obviously they all come in perfect quality and without any glitches.
User avatar
Master Kyodai
"After Burner...Great!"
"After Burner...Great!"
 
Joined: May 2003


Return to Community Projects

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest

Powered by phpBB © 2000-
ShenmueDojo.net