The Oddity Of Max Payne (2001)'s In-Game Soundtrack
TL;DR: I'm trying to establish why the music files in the first game, while higher quality on Xbox, also exhibit a very pecular slowdown which is just significant enough to notice but not big enough to explain using typical reasons (sample rate conversion or a difference between PAL and NTSC releases). Below is the actual post with all the details I've figured out, or at least parts that don't go over my head.
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Hi,
Some time ago I posted the OST on my channel from the PC files, but now that I'm replaying the games again, I was curious to see if maybe I could re-do my efforts, and I began looking into it a bit deeper, and here is what I found, starting from platform differences:
- Although the PC version is the original release, the audio is quite compressed, understandably given its age, but it appears to simply compress down to 8-bit. This works okay just listening to the loops, but for a full song containing fade outs and the like, like the main theme, quiet parts exhibit audible artefacts, likely either not using dithering or using poor dithering that does not resolve well within the 8-bit space. Still, they're servicable and easy to access, and this is what I used initially as my source, and later reference.
- The PS2 version unfortunately has its files packed in such a way that makes it difficult to extract audio, unless I was doing so manually with HxD or something.
- The Xbox version actually has had a decent amount of work put into it. Most importantly, for the purposes of this, it has the best quality audio, which would actually be great if not for the fact the audio appears slowed down, resulting in slightly longer files with a lower pitch. I initially considered that this was a consequence of a PAL/NTSC conversion, but that is not the case, as both versions of the game have the same audio assets, and slowing them down to theoretically match the PAL/NTSC conversion makes it worse, and is also why I disregarded the idea that the sample rate was wrong. The difference is noticable, but it's not big enough to conclude this.
I sat with this for a while, for now stuck with the mostly inferior PC version which I initially used, until recently when I eventually pulled up the files again to see, and what I ended up doing is, in Audacity, after experimenting with manual percentage values, I ended up trimming the tracks so that they would start and end on the same waveform sample via visual matching, then I took the exact amount of frame samples from the PC audio, and then I pasted that value for the speed change in the Xbox audio, resulting in audio that was perfectly timed to the exact frame, and with this exact percentage, I was able to fix the speed issue of the Xbox audio and get a restored soundtrack. I even overlayed the audio, and everything was sonically right, no mastering differences were noted, merely compression, and this is consistent across all music files.
Some technical details, which I ended up re-doing again now just for the writeup as I did not save the values originally, but, using Max Payne's Theme as an example, I used a PC audio sample, that, after preparing with trims, contained 9711916 samples at 44,100hz, versus Xbox's 9863668 sample count at the same sample rate, a difference of 1.563% (Audacity's figure).
Sorry about the mess, I'm actually not the best person for doing technical writeups or videos, but if anyone on here is savy, maybe they can figure it out? Maybe HxD could inform us, but I'm not the person for it, I can't really read it.
Oh, and yes, I will re-post my original OST video with fixed download links, I just got sidetracked by this rabbit hole lmao