OCRemasters?

[Audity]

I've been playing around with foobar2000's DSPs for years now, and I'm probably a bit limited in my thinking. But either way, I keep relying on Resampling (SoX, "99% Passband", "Best" quality, "allow aliasing/imaging" [not sure if this last part is good, but 99% retained the "23kHz" frequencies of virt's "Plasmatextor" according to foobar's visualization, while 95% didn't] + Noise Sharpen DSPs.

This is my current fan-remastered product, from the Tsugunai "Static Wonderland" source: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yKO_cPMDAxlrs6bpiWIIyRHBPR_hdp12/view?usp=sharing

I took the VGMix version of the source, since it's 128kbps CBR, instead of the lower VBR that WAS on OCR (and weirdly mastered, BEFORE I think the torrent/site changed the ReMix to be the same one as the on that was on VGMix?).

 

Then I raised the overall, originally very quiet volume in Audacity. Then I applied resampling, and noise sharpening (via two exports of different sharpnesses depending on which part of the music sounded better, and then edited them around in Audacity), both in foobar2000. It's the first time I've exported multiple sharpens and edited them together, which I've always known would sound better (than applying a universal sharpen to the whole mix). ... One exported noise-sharpened setting was implemented generally in the first half, with the other generally in the second half.

 

foobar2000's Noise Sharpen DSP actually generally isn't great, since I notice it gets rid of certain unique bass signatures/timbres, but in this track's case, I don't think that bass range is very prominent; and the rest of the piece is drowning in its own quietness, thus sharpening in this case generally brings out a lot more, as definitely generally a risk vs. reward scenario. I found that also to be the case with Aphrodite Oceanus, and likely a number of other mixes. I think there are still a few sections, here, that get shafted by the bass-washing.

 

It's 24bit, 48kHz, lossless, so a pretty big file size. I tried WavPack's hybrid lossy mode to try 1000kbps, but even then things just didn't sound right (and not sure what the mechanics are or why it's called hybrid lossy instead of just lossy).

 

I only have an i5 computer, but I feel like with a more powerful computer, I could apply higher resampling by which any DSPs would be more effective.

 

Oh yeah, on that note, I found that Noise Sharpen DSP (in foobar) works differently depending on what sampling rate you set. If the sample rate is too high, then Noise Sharpen doesn't really do anything, so I try stacking them, but more nothingness occurs, and I think that bass-washing actually gets way worse with the giant stack. (I wish I could modify the code of Noise Sharpen actually, to not product such a vast increase in sharpness with every percentage point.) If anything, I think there should be more, different kinds of sound improvements available as DSPs for foobar. There are probably better programs for this sort of thing.

 

So, thoughts? Is doing this a lost cause? Will these sorts of efforts always result in people appreciating the novelty but ultimately with falling back to the listening to the original mix? Unfortunately there's probably a good amount of older OCReMixes that can't be remastered aside from finding solutions like this. Not to say Static Wonderland is particularly bad, just very/quite quiet, and with a few subdued/muddy aspects both related to and irrespective of the master volume.

 

I like the part without percussion just before the distorted flute-like sample, because you can really hear the harp etc. in a much sharper way, and I doubt I will ever prefer the original mix to it, now. (I also slightly slightly modified the amplitude surrounding that whole section.) In that way, I think Aphrodite Oceanus is a better contender, since it has very minimal percussion and has heavy use of lower quality samples—while this has a sort of variety of details in high and low instruments/samples that can get whacked out by the Noise Sharpen. Overall, I think there's an improvement?

Edited June 14, 2021 by Audity

[Gario]

Heh, and I thought I was the only one who did this to tracks from time to time (I just use Audacity when doing this with other people's music, personally).

TBH it's pretty cool to do this to your own collection, sprucing it up for personal use, but do remember that while OCR distributes the music with a non-exclusive license to do so, we technically don't have the right to go put out "updated" versions of other people's music without their permission (nor does anyone else, for that matter, since it's still their music), so I would say unless you can manage to get people's permission for putting out remastered versions of their music it's probably a no-go in general, as far as distributing remasters go. That's not to say you can't do it on your own - it's sometimes really fun to have a personal copy at home of a remastered version - it's just not something that you should distribute on a wide scale without talking to the artists first.