Sound effect replacements

[[Unknown]]

The PSP has lots of ways to output sound, but one that games typically use for sound effects is an ADPCM VAG. It's not very high quality, but it's simple. It's sometimes used for music, and usually used for sound effects.

It would be fairly easy to "replace" these, if people are interested. Replacing other audio (largely ATRAC3/ATRAC3+, video, or rarely MP3) is possible but more tricky. A few games also use PCM directly, which is rare but could also be replaced this same way.

The most trivial replacement implementation would:

* Save PCM s16le samples with hash filenames, like texture replacements.
* Read back in the same format for the replaced audio.
* Require the same length and loop settings.
* Expect the same bitrate as the source (e.g. 22/mono or whatever.)

A more advanced replacement implementation could:

* Use a different length and have tune-able looping (this means some replacements could break games and would need to be tested.)
* Potentially load from or even write to an encoded source, e.g. mp3.
* Allow stereo (definitely some complexity...)
* Allow 44.1k in the case of 22k/etc.

Does "sound effect replacement" sound interesting to people? How much would it be used and just how much would the more advanced things be used?

Note: applying the same things (like stereo) to ATRAC3 would be much more complex. But it is doable for VAG, so that's the only one I'm asking about.

-[Unknown]

[Accel]

Maybe replace some musics from better source (like some of the MHFU musics, God Eater 2 and God Eater 2 Rage Burst (the album is out, so yeah))

[YukiHerz]

It would be pretty nice to replace some sound effects with higher quality version, or swapping the music of Freedom Unite with the nicer tracks of MH2, but i don't really see too many people using this feature.

(Now it would be amazing to have specular/bumpmapping for the texture replacement but i'll keep on dreaming for about 20 years.)

[[Unknown]]

Well, replacing music can be a lot more tricky, although it may work for some games.

One difference (but not the only) with music is that games often "stream" music. This makes it hard to replace because the whole thing isn't available at once - and sometimes two music files can look identical until more of them play. In these cases, it would be easier to just rebuild the ISO with the new music files, and you get into some romhacking. Some games also hardcode the expected length of music.

Sound effects / VAG are simpler, because there's no way to stream, really. The whole thing is available at once, so it's easy to identify and differentiate.

I don't have it, but I highly doubt Monster Hunter uses VAG for its music.

As for specular/bumpmapping, well, I suppose that's possible as long as we don't need more vertex data. We'd have to shade differently, but theoretically as long as the assets were provided.

-[Unknown]

[LunaMoo]

Cool stuff like always, through trying to think about games where low quality sounds were trully bothering me nothing comes to my mind. Guess after I gave up on using headphones for games I grew pretty high tolerance to 22KHz mono sound.

Looking what others would like to be using this aka something it wouldn't allow / music replacements, would probably be easier to just restore separate sound sliders, this time named correctly and maybe for every source instead of confusing "music" and "sounds" groups. I mean that's probably the only reason people even requests those sliders for ~ to disable in-game music and play their own. Sound menu is rarely ever used anyway so a bit of clutter there wouldn't hurt.

[Efraim Lopes]

I think it will be great, if we can change some annoying sound with a different one, like some objects or music, like a weapon shoot sound or sword crash on enemy to a better one, I don't know if is hard to do so but certainly is a nice idea.

[FinalBlast]

By all means, if this is possible and you've the time and patience, do implement it, I for one will definitely tinker with changing the sound effects in quite a few games, likely there are more who would find this useful.

[Cordon]

I'd freaking love this if it gets implemented, finally will I get to replace the crunchy crappy sounds of games such as WWE All Stars, and change sounds to others that I like more. As FinalBlast said, please, if you can and you want to do it, do it.

[Trokinos]

That would be amazing to be able to replace sounds effects and musics by ones we would choose.
And indeed for games like WWE All Stars considering how garbage the sound work has been done on it on both psp and ps2, it would be great to use your own sounds selection.

So please, if you have the inclination and the patience, you'll make a lot of people happy if you can manage to make this work.

[Efraim Lopes]

Any news on this? :o

[[Unknown]]

Well, everyone keeps answering "Yes, I would like to replace music." Music is the thing that wouldn't get replaced, at least in the vast majority of games. That you'd need to edit the ISO and potentially game code for.

I don't really relish the idea of tons of "Music replacement not working" complaints, issues, threads, etc. I realize it's confusing that there are two completely different subsystems for playing audio.

You can check your favorite game - watch the Debug Log. If it says "sceAtrac" anywhere in the log, you're virtually guaranteed that any music/voices cannot be replaced simply. In some cases you'll have to edit game code to change it (for example, in Trails in the Sky, this would be true iirc.)

VAG is used for short sound effects - that's why replacing can work. All of the sound effect is in memory at once. This is not true of music and voices, which are often "streamed", like Pandora (from the emulator's perspective, it might be coming from the UMD, the internet, anywhere - it's just streaming.) Pandora makes replacing things hard.

A very small number of games use VAG for music - I think they are ALL ports of PS1 games. It is very unlikely the game you want to replace music in uses VAG for music.

-[Unknown]