ROM Hack Discussion Sakuna of Rice and Ruin - trying to make an audio patch for the highly compressed dialogue audio

[whateverg1012]

Anyone who has played Sakuna may have noticed the bad quality of the dialogue audio on the Switch version:

Switch (4:46):

https://youtu.be/n0dPzqYK3eY?t=286

PC (4:29):

https://youtu.be/gB0e0UB16rs?t=270

I am trying to make a layeredfs patch to fix the dialogue. The PC and Switch file directory seem interchangeable, with the PC files in dataWin/ and the Switch files in dataSwitch/.
The files of interest located in these folders seem to be AudioCommon.arc, AudioEventVoice_en.arc, AudioEventVoice_jp.arc, and AudioStream.arc.

However, when placing the PC audio files as a layeredfs patch into [titleid]/romfs/dataSwitch/, the Switch version ends up having no audio at all.

Any ideas?

 

[masagrator]

Some audio middleware is using random filename patterns or they are using different codecs (on Switch to have 5.1 you need to use PCM compliant files like WAV). You need to open those arcs files and check filenames + codecs in PC and Switch.

 

[whateverg1012]

Some audio middleware is using random filename patterns or they are using different codecs (on Switch to have 5.1 you need to use PCM compliant files like WAV). You need to open those arcs files and check filenames + codecs in PC and Switch.

That makes sense, any idea how to uncompress and recompress these .arc files? Unable to find tools online that work.

Was thinking this would be a simple job, but if it requires using a hexeditor it may be beyond my ability...

 

[masagrator]

It's using custom engine, so dunno which tool (if there is) can open it.

 

[whateverg1012]

It's using custom engine, so dunno which tool (if there is) can open it.

Yeah looks like it may be a more involved process than I thought, thank you for the help though! I'll poke around and see if I can figure anything out.

 

[cucholix]

Seems there’s an extractor, but no packer yet.

https://zenhax.com/viewtopic.php?p=60201#p60201

I also noticed the overall audio is spoiled by the compressed voice over

 

[cucholix]

SakunaTool works for me in both (PC-Switch) AudioEventVoice_Jp.arc files but currently there's no way to pack them back, also the Switch version points to a .nsopus file while the PC version points to a .opus file.

This is what I got with the PC .arc file

Ogg encode 48 bitrate sound file.

On Switch side the header is garbled:

I tried to rename the .opus files from PC version to .nsopus but I got no voice audio, other audio plays fine though

Funny enough the PC version audio files are slightly smaller in size than Switch version, but they sound better , so it wasn't a problem with the overall size of the game to fit in a gamecard they just encoded it in lower bitrate for some reason.

 

[masagrator]

@cucholix pulled me to check this and my theory is completely different:

By checking Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin probly figured out why some games have so shitty audio on Switch. SDK for Switch includes Opus encoder which is designed to generate audio files compatible with hardware decoder included in Switch. (1/3)

— MasaGratoR (@masagratordev) November 23, 2020

My guess is to achieve similar quality as on PC devs would need to use many times higher bitrate which they prefer to avoid. In Sakuna for PC voice audio files are also using opus, but generated with opusenc, have similar bitrate as on Switch, but they have better quality. (3/3)

— MasaGratoR (@masagratordev) November 23, 2020

So only way to get PC audio files running on Switch is to have SDK installed, use opus encoder included in SDK with much higher bitrate to convert PC audio files and replace data with hex editor in each one nsopus. On pc opus encoders limits max bitrate to 256 Kbps, so probably on switch you won't get higher.

PC and Switch versions may are using the same bitrate, just differences in page aligning (heavily used on Switch 0x80 vs non existent on PC) give slightly different filesizes.

 

[cucholix]

Almost 2 years later with masagrator help and his tools, I managed to convert PC audio files into high quality sound voice over files, the catch is that I need to test it in the final boss, I need to be sure if it works there as it has problems with one sequence in the game, the sequence is a clip that autoplays without pressing the A button, the final boss clip autoplays too, so there's a chance it doesn't work correctly thus would need make some other changes.

 

[mathew77]

@cucholix
Can't wait for the release, heheh.

 

[cucholix]

@cucholix
Can't wait for the release, heheh.

Well, the sooner I get the save the sooner the release

 

[cucholix]

Ok, fixed the video skips manually editing the sound file headers, now no sequence should have problems, the whole japanese voice acting is high quality now

 

[cucholix]

#Sakuna #SakunaOfRiceandRuin #NintendoSwitch
Original audio file pic.twitter.com/k2sPupNh5W

— cucholix (@cucholix) September 17, 2022

#Sakuna #SakunaOfRiceandRuin #NintendoSwitch
Re-encoded audio file pic.twitter.com/L4oMmDIEAB

— cucholix (@cucholix) September 17, 2022

 

[masagrator]

1571172236509446144
1571172483025477632

And it's important to point out both are using the same bitrate.

 

[cucholix]

https://www.nexusmods.com/sakunaofriceandruin/mods/1