Lossless Soundtrack

albuquerque · Jul 2, 2011

hi there. i was looking around for Cave Story's soundtrack since i enjoyed it so much while playing the game, but none of the conversions i found were faithful enough to the music in-game for my taste. (or, at least, not for the specific version that i played.) so i did my own conversions, and am posting the results and process here for anyone else who wants a different rendering of the music.

downloads:

both downloads have all 41 tracks, but the torrent has lossless and XM formats too. if you download the torrent, please help seed it when you're done.

technical details:

note: OS X with zsh as the shell was used for the entire process.

the conversion pipeline goes like this:

org > xm > wav > m4a or flac

org > xm was done by the excellent org2xm program. i compiled it with

Code:

gcc -fnested-functions org2xm.c -o org2xm

along with the equivalent command for the accompanying wave100 program.

xm > wav was done with VLC:

Code:

vlc -I dummy $1 --sout "#transcode{acodec=s16l}:standard{mux=wav,dst=${1:r}.wav" vlc://quit

wav > m4a used afconvert:

Code:

afconvert -v -f m4af -d aac -s 3 $f m4a-vbr/"${f:t:r}.m4a"

and for wav > flac i used the XLD gui.

so hopefully this is of use to someone. enjoy.

-a

Cave Story · Jul 2, 2011

albuquerque said:
Cave Story's soundtrack

Here you go.
This is found in the Cave Story Tribute Site Homepage, inside the downloads section.

Carrotlord · Jul 2, 2011

These sound amazingly similar to the ORGs. Nice job.

Kick Ass · Jul 2, 2011

Sound great! nice

albuquerque · Jul 2, 2011

Cave Story said:
Here you go.
This is found in the Cave Story Tribute Site Homepage, inside the downloads section.

that was the first one i found, but it has a number of audio quality issues. (clipping, clicks & pops, distortion...)

X-Calibar · Jul 2, 2011

I'm interested in hearing the difference of this XM converted version~

On the torrent. ETA : Infinity?
You should probably upload that somewhere else...
It started finally!! I will seed for today.

...I made a lossless (flac) soundtrack back in '06...

I'll post it in case you're bored and want to compare it...
http://www.4shared.com/file/-_nnuVmR/CaveStory-losslesspart1.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/mZi_bozw/CaveStory-losslesspart2.html

They are split into two parts... You need something that can open a RAR file to open them...

Basically I just got on a computer that played back the orgs well, recorded the whole thing from OrgView into wave stereo 48khz; got it home, and divided up the recording, working with the uploader mp3s side by side to match up my new rip with the old one; [and to get volume and time right (and made sure no clipping occured)]

albuquerque · Jul 3, 2011

here's a mirror for the flac and xm files: http://ge.tt/8mWkbd5

X-Calibar said:
...I made a lossless (flac) soundtrack back in '06...

I'll post it in case you're bored and want to compare it...

nice, thanks. the main differences i hear are volume (i forgot to normalize...) and clicks at the beginning of samples in some tracks (e.g. Running Hell). the game has clicks too but not as pronounced. maybe its hardware dependant?

there also seems to be random drops in volume for a few hundred milliseconds in places and some weird stuff going on in the high frequencies in the menu theme, but i might just be hearing things.

X-Calibar · Jul 3, 2011

I noticed quite a few small differences between the two with my headphones on...
But, comparing the Hell clicks to my current PC's in-game Running Hell, it indeed sounds a bit less noticeable. So, I suppose each person's sound hardware will affect what you end up with.

At the time I made the recording my current newer PC messed up the sound something terrible... [other people were having issues around that time as well... I guess new sound drivers and cards fixed all that; since I don't hear those issues anymore]
The recording was made on my grandma's ancient PC! lol

Comparing the recording to the one you made... I do notice the difference between 44 and 48KHz...
Also, different volumes for instruments, and different panning effects. In general it sounds a bit different in various spots ...
i.e. "The Way Back Home" compare those at the same volume and you'll notice one instrument from yours really sticks out compared to mine.

They both sounds good though, maybe our hardware really adds yet another interesting aspect to Cave Story... As Pixel would say, "I leave it up to the player's imagination<hardware>" lol

Thanks for the soundtrack!

albuquerque · Jul 3, 2011

hm, that's a good point about the sample rate. it definitely could affect sound somewhat since many of the instruments are "pure" waveforms. i'll have to try a 48kHz version sometime.

the org2xm readme mentions this, which might be the cause of the difference in instrument volumes:

Volume and panning is linearly streched into the XM range. That may not be entirely correct (volume is supposed to be logarithmic), but it sounds the best.

i guess i'll have to live with there not being One True Soundtrack...but at least the variants are interesting.

Kasurite · Oct 7, 2013

Okay, I'm sorry I showed up a couple of years late to the party, but I did a lot of downloading and experimentation, and here's what I found out.

The way Pixel programmed the .org format, a lot of his waveforms use overtones that go beyond what humans are able to hear, and that means data that goes into the 96khz range (I used Neil Corlett's "Informer" program for spectrographing; it kinda helps to see what you can't hear).

The bad thing about this is what soundcards, and unfortunately even VLC does with this audio, and I mean how they downsample it. Rather than just getting rid of unneeded frequencies, certain soundcards and VLC somehow shove that extra data down into the audible data, and it produces a very jarring distortion. This can easily be heard in the track Gestation, which is very early in the game, making it perfect for us to look at/listen to.

I used OrganyaView and OrgMaker(the notes I'm referring to specifically are the notes in instruments 1 and 6, starting at measure 5) to test the track, along with other tracks, and even though the overtones didn't get even near the 96 khz limit, the downsampling problem continued until I set the computer's sample rate to 192 khz. Then, and only then, there was no distortion, and the notes sounded smooth - well, as smooth as any note with a buttload of overtones could sound, but not like they were "fighting to the death." (I'm sorry to use vague terminology here, but it's the only way I know how to describe it.)

At this point, there's no way for me to convert this into iPod-compatible audio, even if an iPod did support 196 khz.

So then I looked up this .xm format. I downloaded MilkyTracker, and tried the .xms from the music section of cavestory.org. To my surprise, it sounded JUST like the .orgs and also it produced NO distortion. I did some fooling around with the program and found out that it only supported up to 48khz, but it just seemed to get rid of the unnecessary overtones, and when I tried to make a .wav with MilkyTracker, there was STILL no distortion, even with my computer's sample rate set to 48 khz!

So I listened to albuquerque's .flacs, and the distortion was there.
Then I remembered that albuquerque used VLC to convert the .xms into .wavs, so I downloaded VLC and played the xms. Still distorted, and it does the same crappy downsampling that my Intel soundcard does, so it was distorted no matter what my soundcard's sample rate was.

Now, if you are of the opinion that this distortion is necessary to the overall sound of the soundtrack, then albuquerque's .flacs are good, but I think it sounds better without the downsampling problems, and we have no idea what Pixel was hearing when he sequenced the music.

I'll try making my own alacs (iPhone user here) by using MilkyTracker to convert the .xms into .wavs, and iTunes to convert the .wavs to .m4as (alac). If someone else wants to try this, PLEASE go ahead. I'm in college and I should really be working on homework or something.

As to whether or not there's a perfect soundtrack, I don't think one is capable of being made. Every time I tried recording the .orgs with Audacity, the waveform was slightly different every time.

TL;DR: The best way is to use MilkyTracker to convert the .xms into .wavs, and I want to try it for the whole soundtrack, but I don't know if I have the time! Here's Gestation using this process! http://ge.tt/82Dc6vt/v/0?c