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Old May 6, 2022, 05:31 PM
MOV_Games MOV_Games is offline
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I've been analyzing all the content in this album and there's a lot of weird aspects of this release that I thought would be worth documenting here:

* Ice Cavern is a completely different mix, up to 0:50 it's mostly the same as the track in the final game but is mixed differently, after 0:50 it's entirely different and even has an ending rather than a fadeout.

* Twilight Harbour is missing half of the intro section including a unique drum fill part, so the track wasn't simply spliced by Insomniac to make it longer for the game. Rest of the track is 1-1 to the final game. Might be taken from a not quite final mix source file?

* Glimmer's intro is slightly cut off compared to the final game, while Metro Speedway has a longer intro. Nothing major but it's something.

* Hurricos is about half the length of the final track and the ending sustained note is cut short with a fairly sharp fadeout. This one may have been extended by Insomniac for the game as I believe it loops the same parts again, but not certain about this.

* Zephyr is an earlier mix with very notable changes/absences, similar to the early mixes of Sunny Beach, Icy Speedway or Skelos Badlands found in the prototypes and demos currently released. It's even using the earlier development name "Zephyr Meadow". This may have made it into here by mistake or it might be the only mix Stewart still has of the track?

* Fireworks Factory has been notably pitch and speed altered for some reason, and is lacking the fadeout entirely. This almost seems like an intentional edit, possibly even to do with the sample content in that particular track (it's primarily made up of samples from Groovemaker that none of the other YOTD tracks here used so could be issues clearing them for streaming/sale and editing them gets around that). Might also just be a bad export, either way it's a shame.

* Finally, multiple Year Of The Dragon tracks have errors and gliitches in them, some examples being 0:19 in Country Speedway (weird scrape noise), 3:45 on the fadeout of Charmed Ridge (dropout/stutter) and 1:22 in Dino Mines (another dropout/stutter). The YOTD tracks in particular seem like they may have been taken from a worse source than the others?

Bit of a shame that so many tracks are missing, but at least there's still some great upsides to this release such as the three mid 2000's Copeland website vault tracks in high quality, a brand new Spyro 2 track and a handful of new stereo Spyro 1 mixes (still missing a handful even after this though). I additionally wish they had credited Ryan Beveridge for the YOTD tracks since he did co compose every track in the game with Stewart in a constant back and forth (source: a friend and I contacted Ryan through Linkedin a year or two back and he confirmed this) but I guess it might be a legal thing why he isn't?

Last edited by MOV_Games; May 6, 2022 at 05:37 PM.
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Old May 11, 2022, 12:37 PM
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ketsuban ketsuban is offline
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This is a really useful and comprehensive review, much appreciated. I don't have too much to add in addition to what you have already stated, but for the sake of completeness I will complement or add a little chunk of additional information.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MOV_Games View Post
* Fireworks Factory has been notably pitch and speed altered for some reason, and is lacking the fadeout entirely. This almost seems like an intentional edit, possibly even to do with the sample content in that particular track (it's primarily made up of samples from Groovemaker that none of the other YOTD tracks here used so could be issues clearing them for streaming/sale and editing them gets around that). Might also just be a bad export, either way it's a shame.
I found something that points to a bad export with a high likelihood. I have compared the audio sourced from PSX (after resampling it from 37.8 kHz to 44.1 kHz) and compared the difference of pitch with respect to the version released by Stewart Copeland. It turned out that the latter is about 1.0884x the speed of the PSX version. Despite looking like an arbitrary number, it is not the case when we are talking about digital audio.

If we have an audio file formerly rendered at 44.1 kHz and we change the sample rate to 48 kHz (without actually resampling the song), the speed will increase in a ratio of (48/44.1)x, which is... voilà, ≈ 1.0884x. Taking into account this consideration, what I think that happened is the following: Stewart Copeland formerly rendered this song as a 44.1 kHz file, like the remaining ones. At some point, for whatever reason the header of the wav file was changed to 48 kHz without resampling, namely, exactly the same audio information, but instructed to be played at a higher speed. Afterwards, that audio file was converted back to 44.1 kHz, but this time through resampling, that is, interpolating between the samples so that the pitch is being kept the same than the prior 48 kHz file.

In short, if this theory is correct, it means that this song has suffered a process of quality degradation with respect to the original master, because besides the resampling process (which already means a loss of quality), there's less information stored due to the song being up-pitched. The last part implies that if one tries to recover the original pitch, a new resampling procedure using interpolation will be needed. We could say that this song has about a 91.88 % of quality with respect to the original master.

Finally, and continuing with the topic related to sample rate, this release is still a thing. Not only includes stereo versions of Spyro songs that were formerly encoded as mono files in the games, but we also got some of the songs with CD quality (uncompressed 16-bit PCM audio at 44.1 kHz), as opposed to the tracks that were featured on the PSX games (compressed 4-bit ADPCM audio at 37.8 kHz). Furthermore, there seems to be also a subtle but noticeable remastering process behind all the available tracks, improving their quality overall and respecting the dynamic range (namely, without distortion and saturation of the audio).

Quote:
Originally Posted by MOV_Games View Post
* Finally, multiple Year Of The Dragon tracks have errors and gliitches in them, some examples being 0:19 in Country Speedway (weird scrape noise), 3:45 on the fadeout of Charmed Ridge (dropout/stutter) and 1:22 in Dino Mines (another dropout/stutter). The YOTD tracks in particular seem like they may have been taken from a worse source than the others?
Certainly. I think they all can be fixed with enough skill and patience in an audio editor, but I'm not fully certain because I haven't gotten to work on them yet.

If only the soundtrack from the whole trilogy was available without all the aforementioned defects and all the lacking songs... but it's safe to assume that the reason why these missing songs haven't been released is probably because the original masters / projects have been lost, sadly. Needless to say, I really wish to be proven wrong in the near future.
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Old May 14, 2022, 04:05 PM
MOV_Games MOV_Games is offline
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Interesting, I guess something did go wrong with the sample rate at some point during the production of this album or even earlier. I forgot to mention first time around but Fireworks Factory was one of the tracks on his website back in the mid to late 2000's, and there i'm fairly certain it was at the usual pitch/speed.

Since i'm now finished analysing this release, here's the handful of remaining quirks that I spotted:

*All the tracks have cleaner fadeouts than the game files, but a handful (including Artisans, Dark Passage, Magic Crafters and Dark Hollow) fade out notably quicker than the final game files. Magic Crafters also has a very quiet pop at the end of the track, and a couple (Title, Magic Crafters, Credits) have some sort of very low level of digital noise (I don't know the terms very well but the flat constant noise different to static that can cause pops moving between tracks if it's too loud).

*Almost every track here has the same general track mix as the final game, but several tracks have notable volume differences (like the Credits, Cliff Town and Tree Tops which are really chunky and around 97db - DR6/7 according to TT DR). Some go the other way and are quieter like Sunny Beach. Idk if they've been edited for this release or were originally set/exported at this volume, a large chunk of tracks are 1-1 to the final game files in this regard though so it may be how they were always intended to be.

*Artisans seems like it has it's stereo channels reversed compared to the proto stereo files. Weird.

*Twilight Harbour not only has the aforementioned missing section, it's also very slightly faster tempo wise! Only a tiny bit, but when played in sync with the final game file it noticably desyncs and by the end is one or two hundred milliseconds in front. No other track has a speed difference like this.

Yes, I probably over analyse stuff but thought it was worth sharing here anyhow!

Also, probably should mention that as of writing this comment the album has been delisted everywhere (most likely as a result of the Spyro community voicing their displeasure of this release subsequently causing all the tracks featured on the album to become claimed in YouTube and Twitch's copyright algorithms, including gameplay videos of the original game and Reignited.). It might get relisted but not sure when that could be.

Last edited by MOV_Games; May 15, 2022 at 03:24 PM.
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Old May 18, 2022, 05:00 AM
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Myrkul Myrkul is offline
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I think this album was withdrawn from distribution for the moment.
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