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OBSOLETE High Quality in-game score for Red Alert & Expansions


Lightning Hunter

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Well, are any of the VQA files from RA or TD stereo? That would suggest the games at least know how to deal with a stereo stream if they encounter one. Quite how Vladan Bato deduced that the header flags determine if a file is stereo or not presumably without having a stereo file would be interesting to know.

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Hey Nyerguds, can you explain how you got XCC Mixer to convert 44kHz WAV files to AUD?  I noticed a bug in the editor in which some 44kHz WAV files will have the option to "copy to AUD", while other files are blacked out. There seems to be no reason for this.  All 48kHz files have the option to "copy as AUD".  I think you mentioned some hack that fixes this, but I have no clue how to apply a "one-byte hack".

 

Better yet, if you could just upload the hacked .exe for me, that would be easier...

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Triple post, but nobody is responding. :P

 

I realized that XCC mixer is labeling half of the WAV files that I'm trying to convert as an "unknown" file type, which is why they can't be converted to AUD.  Other wav files appear as "WAV" and can be converted just fine.  I have no idea why this is, since all the files I'm trying to convert are the same format in 48kHz Mono.

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XCC uses some inbuilt file "fingerprints" where it examines various bytes in a file that should have some known value in certain file types and uses that to decide if it knows what the file it. Its not perfect though and you are probably running into that issue with the wave files. It also doesn't recognise some TD/RA type shp files that come with the beta patch or SS even though they are valid shp files.

 

Fact of the matter is that it seems you'll just have to wait for someone to write a new encoder that will handle all the wav files you want to use and that will encode a stereo file.

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Fact of the matter is that it seems you'll just have to wait for someone to write a new encoder that will handle all the wav files you want to use and that will encode a stereo file.

 

That will be the day!

 

But yes, I tried using Audacity this time to convert the WAV files from stereo to Mono before converting them to AUD in XCC Mixer, and it recognized them all just fine.  I guess XCC did not like something about the WAV files created from the other converter I was using... 

 

I hope someone can get stereo files working now!

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Cool, how about Tiberian Dawn? Of course I can use a mp3 player to play those scores anyway...

 

I actually already did create a high quality soundtrack for Tiberian Dawn and Covert Operations.  I just haven't released it yet, because I wanted to see if people cared about the Red Alert version first.  The only problem with the Tiberian Dawn version is that I couldn't find high quality versions of Act on Instinct, Stop Them, In Trouble, No Mercy, and Just Do It Up WITHOUT vocals.  In my opinion, the CD versions with talking and vocals do not fit in the game.  Thus, I feel the original tracks are better, even in lower quality.  If someone can find high quality versions of those tracks without vocals, I would include them.

 

Awesome work you've done compiling the HQ tracks!

 

I second the petition for TD tracks... even if they have vocals, some of us wouldn't mind hearing them in game.

 

Also, could a similar thing be technically possible to do with Dune 2000? I believe they use a different audio format.

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Good news everyone. Seems the earlier games (TD, RA, SS) do support stereo and will play it according to testing conducted by Tomson with a tool I wrote. Just need to do a bit more QA on the tool, but shortly we should have a command line wav2aud program that can encode 48000 16bit stereo wave files into corresponding aud files that the game can use.

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Good news everyone. Seems the earlier games (TD, RA, SS) do support stereo and will play it according to testing conducted by Tomson with a tool I wrote. Just need to do a bit more QA on the tool, but shortly we should have a command line wav2aud program that can encode 48000 16bit stereo wave files into corresponding aud files that the game can use.

 

That's awesome news!  I will certainly be releasing a Stereo soundtrack promptly after the release of this tool.

 

Can I make a request for wildcards in the command line tool, so I can perform a batch conversion?  I have like 200 WAV files to convert to AUD, so it would take forever if I had to do them one at a time.

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Notes on Stereo support.

 

C&C DOS supports Stereo aud files however it is forced to play audio back as Mono.

 

C&C95 and RA fully support Stereo aud's up to 48000 hz currently, however 64000 should be the theoretical limit, at this time the tool seems to corrupt audio with higher frequencies than 48000.

 

Sole Survivor does not properly support Stereo audio. It does play it back in stereo but with pops and clicks

 

Dune 2000 Does not support Stereo at all

 

Tiberian Sun Does not support Stereo at all either

 

Red Alert 2 support is unknown, its known it should be able to handle aud but if it indeed does its likely to be the same as TS.

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Just use dir /b *.wav and do a search-and-replace to add the command before each line.

 

Yeah, I have no clue how to type that out in a batch file.

on the command line, type

dir /b *.wav > list.txt

This will create a file called list.txt containing a list of all .wav files in that folder.

 

Then you just need to open list.txt, paste the conversion command on the start of each line and remove the .wav at the end, (which is something that can be done rather easily with search & replace on any text editing tool slightly more advanced than Notepad), rename to .bat, and run it.

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Just use dir /b *.wav and do a search-and-replace to add the command before each line.

 

Yeah, I have no clue how to type that out in a batch file.

on the command line, type

dir /b *.wav > list.txt

This will create a file called list.txt containing a list of all .wav files in that folder.

 

Then you just need to open list.txt, paste the conversion command on the start of each line and remove the .wav at the end, (which is something that can be done rather easily with search & replace on any text editing tool slightly more advanced than Notepad), rename to .bat, and run it.

 

Ah, yes; not sure why I never thought of that! Of course, I still have to copy/paste the command before each line, but that is still faster.

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Well as I said, in a more advanced text editor which can search & replace text including line breaks, all that can be done in one single action. Personally, though, since Editpad Pro supports it, I prefer the regular expressions approach:

 

^(.*?)\.wav$

to

audioset.exe \1

 

Gods, I love regex :D

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