Random: Dataminers Use Original Uncompressed Samples To Restore Super Mario World's Soundtrack

People have done this with both Super Mario 64 and Star Fox 64's OSTs and they sound really good.

Then you have the fellow that remade the DKC Trilogy's soundtracks which also sound fantastic. I think he created the music from scratch but it still sounds damn good.

I'm getting Mario RPG vibes during portions of the track.

SNES had the worst sound chip of consoles at the time. Everything was a trumpet, lol

Wow sounds much clearier and more native to the ears.

Sounds great, almost like a PS1 game in terms of the clarity.

Publishers still skimp on audio to save a bit of coin.

coughSuper Smash Bros. Ultimatecough

That should have shipped on a 32GB cartridge due to the sheer quantity of music in the game (nearly 30 hours in the base game alone), but according to a data mine of the sizes of the game's assets, 30ish hours of music was crammed down to a paltry 1.4GB (or maybe it as 1.7GB; either way, it's laughably small). Even without knowing this (and I am no audiophile by any stretch), I noticed the lack of range in the audio, and it's a travesty that one of the finest games ever made has been artificially hindered in this fashion as there was no reason to do so, especially considering that it is an "evergreen" title that will maintain its price for as long as the Switch continues to sell and has gone on to sell over 20 million units with no signs of slowing down.

Ubisoft also screwed over Just Dance as 2017 shipped on a 16GB cartridge, while opting for 8GB cartridges for subsequent releases (including 2021). Worse still is that Ubisoft's decision to opt for a smaller cartridge for the physical release gets passed on to digital buyers as well. The irony is that the "last gen" Wii U versions (when they were still making them) would have looked and sounded better than their "next gen" counterparts.

And also ironic is that the Wii and Wii U installments of Smash Bros. would have superior audio quality to Smash Ultimate.

@NinChocolate You probably never play anything on there other than Super Mario World then. Have a listen to these before you make that judgment.

The only disappointment with the Super NES audio itself was that not a lot of surround was use for every game so you won't be able to hear the full quality of the tunes on some of them but if you play it on an emulator or FPGA devices like the Super Nt you could change the deph of the tunes and even get surround from them making the game sound richer than it normally does.

@NinChocolate You must be unaware that several SNES games have soundtracks considered the greatest of all time in gaming. And that is in their compressed form.

@Deadlyblack what are the dkc remakes? I’m curious to hear them.

@Silly_G Just goes to be a reminder that if in Smash you come across a track you like, look up the original from the corresponding game series. The versions of many tracks in Smash, unless specifically made for Smash, are condensed versions of the full track. An example being the DK Rap remix from Melee was shortened for the 3DS/WU Smash titles, presumably because Nintendo wanted both versions to be the same, meaning the WU version would have the same assets as the 3DS version.

@Everyone_Else Just hours ago, I watched a new video of exactly this topic: uncompressed sample music, except it was from the Gameboy Advance.
Everyone argues over which console sounded better, but honestly, in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing, the NES, GB, SNES, and Genesis could really sing.

The Castle Theme from Super Mario World is for me, one of the greatest pieces of video game music ever created.

@NinChocolate the Genesis would like to have a word with you.

@Ghost_of_Hasashi One of those is also a fan made remaster.

@Ghost_of_Hasashi I’ll raise you the Alien 3 Soundtrack

http://youtube.com/watch?v=S5RiwtCX14k

This is really cool to hear the patches and instruments completely uncompressed. It's also really cool to hear how the dataminers interpret how it's mixed. I'd love to get my hands on these patches

@AG_Awesome Check out "Jammin' Sam Miller" on YT. His work is fantastic.

@OorWullie man it still gives me chills 😎

@NinChocolate If the SNES had the worst sound chip of its time, Nintendo would've given Sony's PlayStation deal the boot much sooner than they did.

What a great idea!
Would love to hear uncompressed GBA audio, that thing had pretty lousy compression quality

I must respectfully disagree with you in the strongest possible terms, @NinChocolate.

@Ghost_of_Hasashi's eloquent response does not even include heavy-hitters like

• the Castlevania 4 soundtrack, perhaps the strongest of the entire library, which includes themes such as the Waterfall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUEC1Rcb1TA&list=PL2528F4AB5484907F&index=7), or
• the Final Fantasy VI OST (the Opening Theme alone! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUrXxDMICfE&list=PL-vD6rIjXrcJBXMbZlwDqbtOwFRjcJGkz&index=1), and
• all those Mega Man X themes, like Storm Eagle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olzQIWapd-k).

I am listening to that Alien 3 soundtrack right now, though. Sounds interesting...

I think mario world has my favorite music, of any Mario game. So good all the way through, including the sound effects.

I thought YouTube had audio compression

Hm. I have mixed feelings about what I hear. On the one hand, it sounds great on its own terms, but I'm glad that the sound on the SNES isn't this clean. A lot of that old instrumentation is very iconic, and an indication of a point in history. I love all those old, chunky noises from the 16-bit era consoles.

I use an old, OLD music program called Noteworthy composer, and it's funny, the midi channels in that program sound very similar to the stuff in this video.

Either way, it's neat to hear these things, but I will retire my ears to the originals, always. And the occasional remix/live performance.

NINJA APPROVED

@COVIDberry you guys talking about compositions, when he said sound chip. He didn’t say the snes had bad compositions.

@CromAstronomy Genesis had an objectively better sound chip. SNES had great compositions. Great compositions dont make great sound chips or vice versa. The SNES used compressed samples. No matter how you roll the dice, the snes was putting out lower quality audio. The Genesis used an uncompressed synth chip. It factually put out higher quality sound. By definition, compression degrades sound quality. And SNES sound was super compressed far more than a late 90s mp3 from Napster.

That’s not “restoring”, it’s rebuilding.

Shame the ending music is missing, that's my favourite.

everything sounds better uncompressed, simply look up the Goldeneye 007 soundtrack uncompressed and you'll see.

@NinChocolate what? Compared to genesis fart sounds, it sounded way better.

I was like: "this sounds no different"

And then I put my earphones in.

@AG_Awesome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxAZfLenfa0&list=PLKNuUcvZGX23N53oLt93q4CZRj8m-Il_-&index=22

This tune is one of the best of all time - inside or outside a video game

Everyone knows the best music from SMW is the ending theme. Check out this AMAZING video of a chap sightreading (as in hasn't seen the music before, or heard it) the music on the piano, absolutely amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8

Amazing. The gigaleak just keeps giving. Endlessly fascinating

@Deadlyblack thank you for getting me that! Can’t wait to to listen.

@BongoBongo. Absolutely! SOOOO man good songs from that classic. I think my fav is the lava one.

@mr_benn Fantastic video!! Thanks for sharing.

It sounds as I remembered 🤷

@Silly_G
I suspect that the SSBU music was done intentionally for nostalgia and of course there's the other reason of Nintendo wanting to save money, forcing the game to hit EXACTLY at the 16gb limit of those cards rather than using a 32gb.

Wow that sounds really good. What if we'd get a Super Mario World remake/remaster with these uncompressed tunes? Same for other great SNES titles.

@NinChocolate Are you kidding me?? The SNES easily had the best soundchip out of the 3. By a large margin.

The best-sounding most unbelievable soundtrack on SNES is

"Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge"

Here's a YT playlist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Q0s95SRXM&list=PL224CFF3B77A60C49

It's like a Jazz Band is playing inside the game cart. Even the High Scores List soundtrack is excellent wtf..

@Tim_Vreeland while on a technical level that may be true the diverse range of sounds the snes could produce were much wider than that of the genesis and I will still say that while clarity may be better on genesis, overall music not just composition was far superior on snes. To me the genesis while a great system I loved, just had raspy grating chip tunes whereas snes actually could produce some nice music despite slightly less clarity.

Wow, this is amazing.

@NinChocolate

I found the guy who's never played a Genesis or TG16..

The sound on the SNES was miles beyond those 2 till they put expensive CD drives on em.

it sounds AMAZING!

If we are talking about great SNES sountracks we must include Plok

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5c2wU_oMFo

Wow, that sounds so good!

absolutely amazing!! gotta say tho some of the charm is kinda gone with no chiptune haha

Maybe it's just me, but I think the original sounds better. Perhaps it's an audio balance issue or something, but this version has some parts of the music kind of obscuring other parts of the music that you could hear more clearly in the original (like at 00:39), and to me not hearing those parts makes me feel the song is "wrong".

@Silly_G I'm not an audiophile either, so I can't explain it in the proper terms, but essentially, they cut all of the higher ranges out of the songs. Comparing the audio samples of the songs, the originals, at high quality to the ones in Smash Ultimate, the upper ranges of the songs were removed entirely. In space where there was data in the original songs, it just no longer exists.

First, music is among the most subjective things there are, among a few other things. I've always thought that the SNES' sound chip was the wrong chip for the system. It's a capable chip, but was severely restricted in a couple of ways. Internally, it had a very small amount of audio memory for sample playback. And it was obviously held back by the small cartridges of the time. I always thought the system would have benefited from a combination of FM synth with dedicated sample playback like some arcade sound chips, though I don't know how that would have affected cost as opposed to their deal with Sony. Since those days, the chip's capabilities have been revealed some more. Regarding comparisons of sound chips, it's very common to compare the best SNES sound to the worst Genesis sound. There are many great Genesis soundtracks(Gauntlet IV is just one amazing example), just as there are many great SNES soundtracks. But just as the Genesis has some bad soundtracks, which was more a combination of an odd sound driver and bad composition, the SNES has its share of flat, muffled sound that is unappealing in its own right(Captain Commando is an abomination). With all that said, I like seeing people push these sound chips to do things they were not meant to and to see how capable they were, so this is cool. It might be a bit too clear for the game and I'd actually like to see the game and music matched up to see how it fits.

Ehmmm... What's "uncompressed" at YouTube?

This is incredible, download this before Nintendo DMCAs it.

Snes music being built around the same technology as midi files, the compression was not necessarily restricted by the cartridge size, but by the sound chip in the console. using the converted snes audio file in midi, and playing it in a modern midi file software renderer (which will feature better instruments, reverb and chorus effects) will have the same effect on any snes soundtrack.

Eh, it sounds the same as ever to me.

@Dash120z so true. Only Nintendo gamers could argue they prefer compression as seen in the comments here. If Goldeneye was on CD, don't chat, Doak stated GoldenEye was weighing in at over 40MB before finding out they only had 12MB for release! Textures were halved and sound was compressed even further.

Kirby 64 restored soundtrack when?

@Emperor-Palpsy said "That’s not “restoring”, it’s rebuilding."

I agree. There's two different things here. One is recreating the song by finding the original (or very close) samples on a synthesizer.
The other is finding a pre-compressed version of the actual trimmed-down samples that were used on the cartridge.

Oh and you don't need to be a "dataminer" to get the cartridge sounds, there are programs to rip the samples from SNES roms. You can then research what keyboards were likely used for those samples and make your own reproduction.

On a similar note, there is a VST plugin called Super Audio Cart which compiles a ton of these original (compressed) samples used in SNES games.

Super Mario World tunes in all of its original uncompressed glory

@NinChocolate
Can not confirm this.

@sleepinglion

I found some GBA ones for Mega Man & Bass and the GBA Sonic games.

https://youtu.be/mxKmcKrhX78

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXRkwGvXTai68e4laN6hdv9hB3HmgEXaG

They still have a bit of that crunchyness to them, but the sample quality is much higher.

@Orpheus79V Cool find, thanks!

Not to pile on, but the idea that all SNES games sound the same is demonstrably false- the SNES sound chip, despite its limitations in hindsight, was incredibly diverse and versatile for the time.

this feels so ... dirty. . . . like i shouldn't be hearing this like a dark secret ! !

What do they mean by “uncompressed”. It is my understanding (maybe completely wrong) that all the tunes from the cartridge were like MIDI - played from the console’s synth - not compressed like we currently see lossy music. So I would just assume this is just played through a higher quality machine

This is really cool and it sounds really good as well.
I knew that N64 audio was compressed, but I didn't realize that Super NES audio was compressed. 🤔
Speaking of data mining, I'm surprised that no data miners have tried to datamine the Balan Wonderworld demo to try and figure out what's going on in the demo. 🤔

@Casco The samples that the Midi files use to play each note are also sound files and they can be compressed — and often needed to be to take less space and play faster.

@NinChocolate Feeling like you targeted the wrong system. The N64 music chip, for instance, was a huge let down and disappointment after the SNES. Just compare the music StarFox and StarFox 64. Maybe that is what you were thinking of? Also... NES, Sega Master System, I mean... Atari 2600. lol.