Sunderland on 15/5/2022 at 03:43
Hello taffers, since this is my first post I apologize if I make any mistakes. There is the Thief Mods and Utilities board, but it seems that it is dedicated to finished mods.
Recently I saw this video of a Half Life mod where each sound in the game was "upscaled" using a tool called iZotope RX, which is very good at restoring compressed audio files back to how they originally sounded.
[video=youtube;mQ2VT2XcWjc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ2VT2XcWjc[/video]
I was very impressed with the results for the NPC dialogues and started wondering whether something similar for Thief would be possible. Of course, Garrett's voice lines sound perfect the way they are, however the guard conversations have a very small amount of compression artifact that is not that easy to notice for most, but on repeated playtroughs you start to notice it more (you can even notice it in the "I'm going to the bear pits tomorrow" conversation), and I am curious if it would be possible to make them sound even better. The only NPCs I can recall that has really badly compressed audio is The Eye and Brother Murus from Return to the Cathedral, they would benefit a lot from an "audio upscale."
Again, sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this, but I was dying to know whether this would be possible to be done.
Azaran on 16/5/2022 at 19:44
I'm not an audio expert by any means, but I've enhanced a lot of music files (underground 90's ep's) using Audacity's equalizer. If you get the scales just right, you can make a huge difference in quality
Sunderland on 20/5/2022 at 16:00
Thank you for the interest Azaran. :) I don't have experience with audio editing but I will try my hand at it, there's a first time for everything. If I manage to make something of worth I will post it here.
Bucky Seifert on 20/5/2022 at 17:02
Ya know what I'd love is restoration of the music tracks in Thief Gold, considering how compressed they all were. What would be especially great is the city ambient tracks in Assassins, always loved those.
Sunderland on 20/3/2023 at 04:33
I can't believe it's been almost a year. :wot: Since then I've made a lot of progress on this... is what I wish I could say. :p
I completely lost focus of this and truth be told there are other free software that work just as well for restoring compressed audio. The conversation files already have a small amount of reverb applied to them to account for people that didn't have a Creative sound card that could handle the advanced reverb system and this makes "restoring" them using something like Audacity a little more complicated. I still want to give this a shot using some AI scripts that I found online, but I don't know if I won't get sidetracked again. :joke:
Quote Posted by Bucky Seifert
Ya know what I'd love is restoration of the music tracks in Thief Gold, considering how compressed they all were. What would be especially great is the city ambient tracks in Assassins, always loved those.
Funnily enough the Downwind Thieves Guild track has a higher quality version in the files but it's in mono instead of stereo. Really wish they would have used that one instead. And your wish is granted, because some of the samples used for the music were found:
[video=youtube;_TljusLd8kg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TljusLd8kg[/video]
It's particularly interesting to see the Bonehoard sounds in their original quality.
Kubrick on 5/4/2023 at 22:22
That is astonishing!
I remember using izotope RX plugins on Pro Tools back when I was a cinema student. Sunderland, how could I help you?
downwinder on 7/4/2023 at 02:08
i got a question can someone do the thief whistle sound in best possible quality i know its a short sound but i was wondering how much better it would be with all this fancy stuff you all doing??? whooo wooooo
