moardib

Someone asked if this would cause problems in the game. The point is: if some wav files contain the same music, is it possible to get the higher quality KOTOR 1 music and replace the cheesy quality music that came in KOTOR 2? It's only a matter of knowing if it works or not. If it does, it proves that the very same sound engine was used and a patch would be only a matter of copy/paste files. It's so easy to do this it's almost unbelievable. And I know Obsidian can do better, it's only a matter of how many people complain. markussun posted in the forums and we all read and listened: the music lacks impedance, clearness, high tones. And we know it was performed by a full orchestra, recorded with the highest quality equipment and mixed in Skywalker Sound. As far as I know, we should be getting 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound. And all this effort was chopped down by compression algorithms to save a few megabytes... what a shame. []s Moardib

Superb job. After reading this post, I immediately opened the music stream folders of my KOTOR installs (yes, KOTOR 1 is still installed). It's a simple comparison. I used Miles Sound Tools for this little experiment. It's a small (less than 1MB), free download, so you may try yourself. I used two files. They are the same music and by simply listening, you notice the difference in quality: - From KOTOR 1: mus_theme_cult.wav (1.405.971 bytes) - From KOTOR 2: mus_sith.wav (518.242 bytes) I used Miles Sound Studio to decompress the files into standard wav format with PCM encoding. The results were: mus_theme_cult.wav - KOTOR I, Bioware Bit rate: 1411kbps* Sample size: 16 bit Sample rate: 44 kHz Channels: 2 (stereo) mus_sith.wav - KOTOR II, Obsidian Bit rate: 512kbps* Sample size: 16 bit Sample rate: 32 kHz Channels: 1 (mono) I don't have a software to make a deeper inspection like spectral decay, but by simply looking at these stats, you can notice something is not right. And don't be fooled by the 32 kHz. This simply means a maximum rate. I also peeked at Neverwinter Nights sound files and this is what I found: mus_bat_aribeth.bmu - Neverwinter Nights, Bioware Bit rate: 1024kbps* Sample size: 32 bit Sample rate: 44 kHz Channels: 2 (stereo) There is simply NO excuse for using sub-standard, low quality files. The least Lucasarts and Obsidian should do is what have been said before: high quality sound pack. I't's not hard to do: when exporting, choose "CD Quality". Zip it and let us download it. Heck, even make a torrent file so we don't need to wait in line with bloated, slow servers. Make our money worth. Next test, I'll experiment replacing sound files. Since the game uses the very same Aurora Engine and Miles Sound, I guess it should be no problem at all. *Units are in kilobits per second. To convert to bytes, divide by 8. Ex: 512 kbps becomes 64kBps.