Upsampling really old game audio

[EricH]

Hello,

I am taking an N64 game from 1997 and bringing it to the Nintendo Wii. This game has a very large amount of VO. Unfortunatley, the only version of the VO that I have is the stuff that was severly downsampled to fit onto an N64 cart way back then. The original hi-rate audio files are not still available.

The files are 8820hz aifs. They are 32 bit, so at least I still have good bit resolution. Is there a plugin or program that anyone can suggest which will do a good job upsampling these to 22k or so? I understand that just upsampling in itself is not really going to help, but I suspect somewhere out there is some software that can analyze my waves and try and restore some high frequencies based on that analysis? Am I dreaming?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Eric

[wst3ae]

you may be in better shape than you imagine...

if these are strictly voice (you mentioned VO from which I inferred<G>) then you can probably clean them up quite a bit without resorting to a lot of trickery...

first up-sample to a reasonable sample rate, I'd suggest 44.1kHz or 48 kHz because you'll get some breathing room that way, but even if you simply SRC to 22 kHz you'll be in better shape than you are now.

second, use a harmonic type 'exciter' to re-create the upper harmonics. I've done this to restore IVR files, and it has worked well.

Things to keep in mind:
1) unlike a musical instrument, the voice contains a non-linear sequence of harmonics, that is, because of the way that formants work you can not just add harmonics all day long, you will eventually shift the formant a little, changing the apparent throat configuration.
2) unlike a musical instrument, the range of the spectral content of the human voice is pretty limited... in this case that's a good thing.

With those things in mind you can start with pretty much any 'enhancer' type plug-in. I believe there is are demos available for both the BBE and the Aphex plug-ins.

Don't laugh too hard, but until recently I got the best results converting the original files to analog, processing them with analog processors, and then re-converting them back to digital. Counter intuitive? Yup. Did it work? Yup!

I used the SPL Charisma and Vitalizer in the hardware domain, I'd use the UAD Precision Enhancer - my instincts suggest that it would work well.

If you don't care to mess with this yourself let me know...

[BuddhaMaster]

Hey 64 player there,

Goldeneye?, Mario Kart 64??, Turok???

[antoniofrengzus]

I can only talk about digital photography, which rely on audio feedback from people here. So, in fact, under certain conditions, or slightly higher oversampling pixel dimensions may appear as aliasing, especially if the algorithm n is not on par . In this case, you can do better example of many more dimensions in pixels and have a softer image.