markussun Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 To all who read this, Please contribute just a few minutes of your time to make a difference: CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2. Telling LucasArts how you feel about the degraded music is arguably the single-most effective way you can contribute to this effort. If continuing feedback shows them that this is a bothersome issue to more than a handful customers, they will do something about it (as history showed with KotOR1). Why is the music in KOTOR2 such a muffled, narrow-sounding, low-quality mess? Because it's all compressed in the lowest bitrate with 10 kHz and, to make things even worse, in MONO! Why MONO?! Is this a bad joke? I was very much looking forward to this new Star Wars-like soundtrack, particularly since LucasArts had created enough buzz about KOTOR2 using a live symphony orchestra this time around to achieve a "big, powerful sound", with legendary Skywalker Sound mixing it. Yeah right. This game goes back for a refund first thing on Monday. KOTOR 2 is buggy enough, but as a gamer seeking quality entertainment I won't accept such sub-standard audio quality in a 2005 game release that comes on 4 CDs! There is no excuse for that. I won't take space concerns as a poor excuse: The whole music assets in KOTOR2 take up a measly 24 MB in its current butchered state. There is over 80 MB (!) unused space left on the 4th CD. If the music were encoded in standard 128 kbit/s STEREO, it would just need an extra 41 MB (2.7x more bytes) -- which would have easily fit on the 4 game CDs. This is preposterous. No... outrageous! Music is *half* the experience for me both in gaming and in movies. It totally creates the atmosphere of the setting, characters and story. Music can generate emotions and feelings and thus pull you into this fictional world -- an effect of immersion that (apart from being there for real and experiencing your own emotions) cannot be achieved by starring at 3D graphics on a flat (2D) 19" monitor alone and listening to some dialogue. Gaming on a flat screen is like looking through a small window into a larger world. But it's the music which opens it up and enlarges that world for you. I'm sure many gamers here are with me on this. Music is the most powerful tool any storyteller can have, because it acts like a second narrator, who can comment on things that are too hard or impossible to put into words. As long as game graphics are still so cartoony and artificial-looking, it is the music's job to add proper gravity and seriousness to the fictional world and story. Ok, enough of this rambling. I'm sure you get my point of how crucial I regard music in this medium (particularly RPG/story-based games). And LucasArts gives us music in MONO (!) at 10900 Hz (half the frequency) at the lowest bitrate?! Excuse me? Are they out of their minds? This ignores and erases more than 10 years of progress in game audio! Music in MIDI at that time was already presented in STEREO. Even games such as Quake (released in 1996) efficiently used pre-recorded STEREO music tracks streamed from the CD (which made a huge difference to the scary atmosphere of the game). LucasArts' own Grim Fandango used a great STEREO soundtrack in 1998 to create an epic experience. That was in the "golden days" of LucasArts of course, when such brilliant minds as Tim Schaffer were still employed there. The original KOTOR from 2003 supplied Jeremy Soule's epic music in 16-bit 44Khz *STEREO* at 128 kbit/s, which is close to CD quality, and the proper way to present Star Wars-like music. It's a symphonic score for crying out loud! Do you people know what MONO 10kHz 48 kbit/s does to the music? In case you don't, let me spell it out: 10 kHz: The music files are technically encoded in 32kHz, but the shocking truth was revealed when I analyzed the MP3 file-header (thanks Swaaye!), which stated that the music was encoded with a "Lowpass Filter: 10900 Hz". I couldn't believe that, so I fired up CoolEditPro and did a Spectral Analysis on the music files: There is absolutely nothing above 10900 Hz! That's what a lowpass filter does, it discards all frequencies higher than that. I was sitting there in disgust upon discovery of this fact. The human ear can hear up to 18-20 kHz. What this practically means is that all the "highs" of the original music were cut out -- half of the frequency range of the music is missing. It will sound muffled and dull because of that. And it does. 48 kbit/s MP3 lossy compression: It is well-known that the MP3 codec utterly fails at lower bitrates (less than 128 Kbit/s). At such a low bitrate as used in KotOR2 the music will be garbled and muddled due to excessive audio artifacting (aliasing) because of running out of bits. This in turn will affect the mid-range and make the music sound "hollow" and "metallic". Symphonic music with its strings and trumpets is particularly prone to this. MONO: Do I have to comment on what MONO does? Come on people, think about it, MONO! Is this the 50s? Playing back a symphonic (!) score in mono will make the whole range of the soundscape collapse. The musical score will not sound wide and epic, but small and narrow, like through a telephone. If you play your games with headphones, mono will give you a very unnatural music-in-your-head experience, which can become quite distressing to your ears after a while (listening fatigue). Why didn't LucasArts encode the whole soundtrack in telephone-quality (~8kHz mono) right away? Man, I'm really upset about this. Releasing a full-priced title in such a poor quality is an INSULT to the gamer and also to the composer (Mark Griskey, who btw did an incredible job making this soundtrack much more Star-Wars-sounding than even Jermey Soule did in KOTOR; Soule used synthesizers, Griskey a live orchestra and a style very similar to John Williams!). A game company's job is selling an experience to the gamer -- to involve the gamer emotionally. That's the holy grail of game development. LucasArts has just shown me that they don't care about or understand the meaning of gaming "experience", and how that is achieved by a large degree through music. A shame for a company associated with arguably the greatest pioneer in sound-mastering and reproduction in the history of cinema. Some readers might think I'm silly for missing out on the good things that KOTOR2 has, by returning the game because they bastardized the music. Well, try to see it trough my eyes (or ears): The original KOTOR for me really came to life through the epic music, more than anything else. It made the game for me. I was looking forward to KOTOR2 already after having heard the preview music, simply because the new music captivated me. And now this! Who made this insane decision to present this beautifully composed symphonic live music in MONO 10kHz at the lowest bitrate? I'm certain that it wasn't Mark Griskey. I would love to find out how he feels about his work being disregarded and mistreated in such a way. He must be in agony as an artist and composer. What's wrong with LucasArts? Why bother recording with a live Symphony Orchestra (which needs a bigger budget) to achieve a more organic higher musical quality, when you then pervert it by degrading it to near-telephone "quality" for the gamer who pays $50 for the experience? This is utterly pointless. Let's not forget that LucasArts is under the auspices of George Lucas, the very man who repeatedly stressed the fact that music and sound make up for 50% of the entertainment experience (I couldn't agree more). Are we surrounded by hypocrites here? Is LucasArts still a Lucas company? How come a game from EA like "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" gets THX treatment (!) (and it really made a difference, it sounded incredible), and LucasArts' own games have never received THX treatment since the program was introduced (by Lucasfilm) for games almost 1.5 years ago? Something is really wrong with this company, and how they treat their own games. Some would call such behaviour schizophrenic. The final product's quality stands in direct contrast with what they promote in such features as the Designer Diaries. Have you people read the "Designer Diary #5 - Music" where Mark Griskey writes about his work on KOTOR2? If not, go read it! You will be surprised how much care and expertise supposedly went into creating and recording the soundtrack. And then you will ask yourself even more why none of that effort ended up in the final game. I'm totally baffled about this. Here are some interesting tidbits from that interview: I was thrilled when recording engineer John Kurlander signed on for the project. John is a veteran film music engineer whose credits include the Grammy Award-winning Lord of the Rings soundtracks. I knew that John would be able to capture the big, powerful sound that I wanted for the score. Yes, and I as a customer would also be thrilled if what was captured by John Kurlander would actually be reproduced when I play the game. The score was recorded at the Bastyr University Chapel outside of Seattle. Bastyr is known for its acoustic properties, and John Kurlander took full advantage of the acoustics with some very methodical microphone placement. [...] We mixed at Skywalker Sound. Mix engineer Dann Michael Thompson and assistant engineer Judy Kirschner provided their exceptional talents, and final mixes were completed after three long but extremely satisfying days. [...] When all was said and done, we had over an hour of new, fully orchestrated music for The Sith Lords! As you can see, an incredible effort was undertaken to live-perform, record, and mix the musical soundtrack for KOTOR2. Even Skywalker Sound was involved, the top address for sound recording and mixing in the movie industry. And then some moron in the game design process made the unexplicable decision to degrade it all down to near-telephone quality for the final product. I truly wonder who made that stupid decision, and I wish the person(s) responsible for this mess will be fired. To Obsidian: Weren't you able to have some say in this? Why did you let yourself be bullied towards such a questionable decision? The question still remains why they did that. It's not a space issue (as demonstrated above already). It's certainly not a performance issue either. Decoding and playing MP3 music needs only one decode stream. MP3-decoding is very cheap on today's CPUs, it's a non-issue performance-wise (the bottleneck in the KOTOR engine is your gfx card, not the CPU). It makes no difference to CPU load if the music source is a 128kbps or 48kbps file (original KOTOR had 128kbps music and ran just fine). To give you an idea of how insignificant MP3 decoding in games is performance-wise, take games like the recent Doom3 which have to decode OGG streams (which need roughly twice the CPU decoding power than MP3). Doom3 uses OGG encoding for almost all sound files, not just for music! At any given moment, Doom3 has to decode 10-20 OGG sounds in realtime (in a fight even more), which is a lot. Still, sound decoding in Doom3 takes up less than 6% of CPU load on a ~1500Mhz minimum spec system (which I confirmed via email with Robert Duffy, lead programmer at id-soft). And that is in Doom3. MP3 decoding in KOTOR1 or 2 is a cakewalk compared to that, especially when we're talking about only 2-3 streams that need realtime decoding, i.e. the music stream, ambient stream and speech. Other sound effects are in WAV. So, that is not the reason why LucasArts/Obsidian decided to butcher the music files. Do you know what I suspect? It just dawned on me: Maybe they supplied the music in such a low quality so they could later sell a potential Soundtrack Audio CD to the public, and make some extra profit from that. Then customers would have a reason to purchase the high-quality CD, since the in-game music was so crappy. But that ploy won't work with me. I want to experience the full-quality music while playing the game, not while driving in my car. If I'm wrong, LucasArts/Obsidian, then prove me wrong: Release the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2 as a separate download (patch) to the public, so that we PC gamers can enjoy the music as it was meant to be. Then I will again consider buying the game. Because, the other possibility is that this audio blunder was a big slip-up. After all, why are the music files encoded in the exact same format they used for their voiceover files? 48 kbit/s in MONO is sufficient for speech (I can accept that), but no sane person would encode music in that same quality. Maybe in the rush to release the game, they accidentally batch-encoded all the files in the same format they configured for speech. Another fact substantiating this is the inclusion of a music track player (!) within the game, as a menu option feature (similar to the cutscenes player). This is pure irony: Who in their right mind would include a music track player so that you can listen to the great music in pure form (without sound effects) if the whole soundtrack is reduced to this sad telephone-quality state? This shows me that the music was always planned to be of CD-quality. If not, why code a CD-Player-like feature then? Also, the splash screen (game launcher) on the Windows desktop features the music in CD-quality STEREO. This is the only time you'll ever hear the epic soundtrack (a short segment) in the proper way -- in the launcher window! How ironic. Once you hit the game's main menu, it's all muffled & narrow mono. If they offered us the proper 44kHz STEREO music in a patch, it would only be a 60 MB download for the music, according to my estimates. That's not too big, considering that many game-patches these days have similar (and even bigger) sizes: Rome Total War - 60MB, Armies of Exigo - 50MB, Star Wars Battlefront - 173MB. In the meantime, I urge the fan community to come up with our own solution to this. Maybe someone can somehow gain access to the higher quality stereo music files and then we could create a MOD to fix this mess ourselves. At least we would make enough noise about it to get noticed. I think if enough of us push in the right direction and let them know what we think about this blunder, they will eventually do something about it. This is unacceptable. Nobody who bought the game should accept this. If you go to a multiplex theater and pay 13 bucks to watch a new movie, would you just accept watching it in analog MONO? Would you allow them to rob you of the full experience (Digital Surround) if you know better? Go email LucasArts! CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2. Telling LucasArts how you feel about the degraded music is the single-most effective way you can make this happen. If they receive continuing feedback on this issue, the chances are good they will do something about it. If you just sit here idly, nothing will come of it. We need to make noise about this -- and act NOW, before the first patches are coming out, because now is the time when Obsidian is still funded by LucasArts to implement any such changes. Later it will be in vain. Also, it might help to add your comment to this thread and thereby let Obsidian know what you think about this blunder. It'll ensure that this thread stays a hot topic. But don't forget: It's LucasArts who needs to get the feedback from you... *they* need to be convinced in order to make the decision to fix this. The music playback in KOTOR2 is below standards -- more than 10 years backwards. We consumers need to speak up about this to let game companies know that we don't accept sub-standard audio! Otherwise they will increasingly treat us like gullible pushovers, who shell out the money and won't know the difference. If we stay passive and don't demand quality, more and more developers will adopt the habit of only doing as much as they can get away with in order to ensure sales. Their marketing team will do the rest. Quality and artistic vision will then begin to erode. Do you want this to happen? It's in your hands. Vote with your gaming dollar and make your voice heard. Small steps can make a difference. And yes, there are always more important things to worry about in life. I can imagine some readers thinking "geez, this guy is extreme, is that all he worries about? I can't even run the game properly!" etc. etc... It's all a matter of perspective. There are many other things in life I worry about, too. But that doesn't mean we have to ridicule things we deem less of a priority. We all have our own convictions and priorities. Right now, I have set my focus on this issue, and it's important to me. And that's really all there is to say. I wrote this big post to inform and to make a difference. Help to make this effort not be in vain... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffreyLebowski Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 i agree 100%. i've completed KOTOR2, and i have to say that while it was overall enjoyable, i really feel like i received a game that should have been released 6 months from now. completely unfinished, and quite frankly the art is awful. it's not often that a sequel looks far worse than the original, but this is the case with KOTOR2. i'm currently replaying KOTOR1 and it completely blows its sequels away with brillant textures, excellent architecture, and amazing sound. quite frankly, KOTOR2 comes off as a user-made expansion to me (albeit a fairly entertaining one). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tk102 Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 Originally posted by markussun Because it's all compressed in the lowest bitrate with 10 kHz and, to make things even worse, in MONO! I won't take space concerns as a poor excuse: The whole music assets in KOTOR2 take up a measly 24 MB in its current butchered state. There is over 80 MB (!) unused space left on the 4th CD. If the music were encoded in standard 128 kbit/s STEREO, it would just need an extra 41 MB (2.7x more bytes) -- which would have easily fit on the 4 game CDs.> I don't know what math you're using but 128kbit/s / 10kbit/s = 12.8 stereo / mono = 2 2*12.8=25.6 24MB * 25.6 about = 600 MB which is another full CD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffreyLebowski Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 Originally posted by tk102 I don't know what math you're using but 128kbit/s / 10kbit/s = 12.8 stereo / mono = 2 2*12.8=25.6 24MB * 25.6 about = 600 MB which is another full CD which would be a non-factor if more companies would get with the modern world and offer games on dvd where they belong. let's see... 10 minute install off one dvd with higher quality textures and sound... or 30 minute annoying 4 cd switch install with low quality sound. let me think here... /sort of off-topic, i know Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
montnoir Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 What makes both KOTOR's great isn't the technical displays. It's the great voice ACTING and solid story. For an RPG, the gameplay is mediocre. For a 2005 game the grapics are horrendous. And for all this it is a GREAT game. The music as well as the graphics isn't what tips the balance for this game, it's qualities lie in different areas. And to state that "the game goes back to retail first thing on monday", because the music is mono... are you for real? You do know that buying music cd-s is cheaper than buying a full-priced game, don't you? As for the games on cd VS dvd, I can agree. But I guess their marketting teams polls showed that there weren't enough people with dvd-roms on their pc-s. So they made it cd only to sell more. Who knows? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markussun Posted February 22, 2005 Author Share Posted February 22, 2005 tk102, Originally posted by tk102 I don't know what math you're using but 128kbit/s / 10kbit/s = 12.8 stereo / mono = 2 [...] = 600 MB which is another full CD No offense, but before you lecture other people about math and stream-size calculations, and then blurt out false information as a correction, please at least put in the effort to go through a simple check-list: Have I read the original poster's post fully? Have I understood it? If unsure, shouldn't I read it a second time? After that, should I correct someone about a topic I obviously have no solid knowledge in? Sorry, if I'm being overly aggressive here. I'm not offended by reading garbage (after 14 years of usenet one gets used to it), but I can't accept garbage coming with a cocky attitude. Practice some humility. I bother to explain: I don't know where you got the idea that KotOR2's music is encoded with a bitrate of 10 kbit/s. The music is degraded bad enough, but not that utterly bad. If you read my post properly you'd know it's encoded in 48 kbit/s. "10 kHz" refers to the frequency range within the mp3, after I analyzed the frequency spectrum in CoolEditPro. (see post) Going from encoding MONO to encoding STEREO doesn't magically double the bitrate, either, as you erroneously believe. A bitrate doesn't care how many "channels" are inside. A bitrate just indicates how many bits it will use per second. 128kbps will stay 128kbps (and the stream-size the same), no matter if you put MONO in it, or STEREO, or Vanilla, or Chocolate. It's obvious you know little about these things, but couldn't you have surmised as much just by using common sense and from your own MP3 usage experience, before blurting out this nonsense? Any PC user who uses MP3 these days knows that the majority of MP3s come in default 128kbps and are typically STEREO. The knowledge of math by itself is useless. You need to be able to apply it properly. I stand by what I stated in my post, as a valid argument: If KotOR2's music were encoded in standard 128 kbit/s STEREO, it would just need an extra 41 MB. It would have easily fit on the 4 game CDs, which have 80 MB of unused space. This information is correct. The 44 kHz *STEREO* music could be easily made available by LucasArts in a patch download, which would only take approx. 64MB to download. This is a download size which many recent game patches typically need anyway, with LucasArts' own recent "Star Wars: Battlefront" patch even as big as 173MB. What's more important: This would result in a significantly better musical experience for everybody, and thus a better gaming experience in total. To conclude: Instead of bickering at each other and being counter-productive about this issue, can we try to stay on topic and do something about it? That's why I wrote this post, to get things rolling. We all benefit from that in the end, no matter how important you value a symphonic score in a Star Wars game. For me, the music in games (and in Star Wars games in particular) plays a crucial role for the experience and enjoyment of it. Anybody who is interested in getting the original STEREO music back in the game, please take a minute now and email LucasArts about it. It's the only way this will happen. We need your help: CLICK HERE to request the proper 44kHz *STEREO* music for KotOR2. Remember that the original KotOR1 had music in 44kHz STEREO. There is every reason that KotOR2 should have at least the same quality. Instead they have given us MONO music with a muffled 10kHz max. frequency. Don't let LucasArts lower the bar like that. It's an insult to us gamers and to the composer. Don't be lazy or passive as gamers, or we'll see more future game releases with sloppy audio quality... Speak up! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markussun Posted February 22, 2005 Author Share Posted February 22, 2005 montnoir, I value your opinion that other aspects in KotOR2 make or break the game for you. But don't speak for others, and certainly not for me. You can't possibly know what aspects of a game appeal to different people. Gaming is a very personal experience. And your cynicism is really inappropriate. Of course I didn't buy KotOR2 solely for the soundtrack that is on it. I'm a gamer and I love the whole gaming experience. If you had fully read my post, you would know why I value music that much in a Star Wars game. There is no need for such a cheap retort. If you have nothing constructive to add to this thread, then why bother arguing/posting? If we succeed in convincing LucasArts to replace the muffled MONO music with the proper high-fidelity STEREO music, then you also benefit from that. What harm is done by that, and why would you oppose such an improvement? Sometimes I wonder why ppl are so confrontational... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drazin Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 I dont know what your complaint is, The game sounds great on my Audigy. Sounds a hell of alot better on my pC than it did on my Xbox anyway. TK102 is a well respected member of this community who has proven himself countless times over with his technological help to members in need. Not to mention his unselfish work in this community to help keep this forum and website a valuable place for Star wars fans to come and find answers to a wide variety of questions. Flamming him over something as miniscule as a math conversion is completely uncalled for and unwanted in this community. I for one will not do as you request simply because of how you handled not only your first post but the way you replied to TK102. good day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
montnoir Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 Originally posted by markussun Sometimes I wonder why ppl are so confrontational... And you are not? What is so constructive in saying that a game isn't worth playing if it doesn't have stereo music? The music and sound in a game shouldn't make or break ANY game, because music and sound by definition are only enhancers, for something else. I thought that was common knowledge. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tk102 Posted February 22, 2005 Share Posted February 22, 2005 I give you points for only for your passion, however misdirected it may be. I concede now that I misread your post. I am practicing my humility. However, seeing that you have made your point by stating it over and over and over again I don't see the point in continuing this thread. Before I close it, however, please read the rules of these forums and ask yourself: Have I read the original poster's post fully? Have I understood it? If unsure, shouldn't I read it a second time? After that, should I flame others? You have been warned sir. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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