Juiced Required (EXPERIMENTAL) PS3 Audio

[SlabBulkhead]

This is something I've had on my hard-drive for way too long until now. It's experimental, but it seems to be working on my end, so it might be fine. I made this solely because the PS3 version of Saints Row 2 had higher quality voice lines than any other version (48khz instead of 24khz), so I just had to port them over so I could sleep at night.

I used some very horrid Python scripts to do this because I would've rather kill myself rather than copy everything over manually.

The main reason I'm labeling it as experimental pulley999 was having some substantial issues with his old audio mod and while I haven't noticed any issues on my end, I want to be sure that this doesn't cause anything bad to happen first.

So is this good alternative to the HQ radio mod? You tell me!


If you wanna give it a try, be my guest!

Download is here of course: https://mega.nz/folder/z653nYRJ#ABiFp_jQNvO03wixawVu4Q

 

[pulley999]

Spent a bit of time trying to play with this today. This is downright awesome! I wish I knew the PS3 audio was in a higher sample rate back when I was working on this, I wouldn't have spent so long trying to polish those 24khz files into something tolerable. This accomplishes everything I was trying to do with that mod back then & then some. Combined with the audio fixes in Juiced (both current and upcoming) the audio in this game will be in the best state it's ever been.

As for the problems I was having-it was mostly that the tools I was using to edit the wavs were resulting in microsecond length changes that ended up causing problems on the banks with many smaller files due to compounding error. I don't think that happened here.

As for the stability problems, I didn't notice any in the time I played with your mod today. Probably Juiced making improvements there. Back then, my game was so unstable it was crashing within 10-15 minutes.

In your readme, you mention this problem:

PS3 Cutscenes is kinda experimental as I had issues building SR2_CUTSCENES.xwb. I got around this by manually encoding the files to MS-ADPCM and then created this bank using XWBTool. I then patched the bank by changing the header to exactly match what XACT would've output had it not had any issues building large XWB banks containing ADPCM encoded files.

The way I got around this back in the day was to try & build the full bank as normal using XACT, and wait for the tool to crash, making note of what file it crashed on. This would create a file with the correct header and bytelength, and partially written data up to the file that crashed. I would then delete every file up to ~2-3 files before it crashed on the first bank, and build a second bank.

Then, I would open the first bank in a hex editor, copy a couple hundred bytes of the trailing end of the written data (important to use a large sample because there are some near-duplicate audio files) locate that same part in the second bank, and then copy the data section from that point onward back into the first bank. Done correctly, it would end up being the same bytelength as the remaining zeroed section of the partially written data in the first bank file. Not sure if that would work here if transcoding is required, and the cutscenes appear fine at first inspection, but if you wanted to try making it 'entirely' with XACT, that's how I did it.

The Samedi cutscene 'Promises' with Female Voice 1 is a good smoke test since it exists right near the end of the cutscenes wavebank. If there's any compounding error issues with file length, they'd show up there.

Also, stood around listening to ambient music for like a half an hour and didn't notice any major issues.