[RELEASE] Shenmue Audio Restoration Project - Shenmue English & Japanese Dub - Shenmue II English

No, I won't be fixing the music. You have a sort of correct idea of what's happening. Essentially, I'm re-doing about half of what D3T did to the audio. In order to do this though, I also have to re-create their whole audio workflow. So I'm doing all the work they did, in order to do half the work they did. It's a little bit odd to explain without showing demonstrations; but essentially I had to track down the exact tools (down to version numbers in some cases) they used to make this port.

That being said; while my previous bitching about not understanding WHY they used the formats they did still stands. I just want to stress harder than ever before, this port is FUCKING INCREDIBLE, even with all the bugs. It's essentially the same thing as Freeablo; or perhaps even more akin to URDE (Metroid Prime to PC port that's currently being made by fans by meticulously reverse engineering Metroid Prime and re-implementing it line by line). I'm growing more and more certain that they had absolutely NO assets, and very very little, if any, source. They were basically handed copies of the games, and were told "have fun". This port was absolutely a labor of love, and it only exists because the team at D3T wanted it to exist.

Thank you, D3T, from the bottom of my heart.

EDIT: I also forgot to clarify, the voices and the music are two separate things. The music was generated on the system; the voices are just streaming audio.

Much respect sir for your shout out to D3T's efforts and the effort you are putting into the audio replacements.
 
Forklift should work with Shenmue II. Please report any issues on its forum post.
 
is it possible to insert some of the dreamcast unique tracks back into cutscenes...etc. with this mod tool?:unsure:

I'm not sure what you mean by "Dreamcast unique tracks" If you mean music, then no, it is not, this deals with voices, not music. Maybe it's because I just woke up so I'm a bit cranky, but it's plastered all over the first post that this is about the voices not the music, please read. If you're talking about things like Yuan's original voice, then yes, yes it is and I'll be doing as such and you'll have the choice of EU, JP, or US voices.
 
Pardon my ignorance, but... are there 3 dubs for this game?
Which are some of the differences between US and EU voices?
The EU version is Japanese, but they dubbed Yuan to have a female voice, where in the JP version he has a male voice.
 
The EU version is Japanese, but they dubbed Yuan to have a female voice, where in the JP version he has a male voice.
Yes, but that's Shenmue II, for the DC, which was never released in the US. Officially, the DC version only had Japanese dubbing.
In that case, the distinction between JP and EU versions is only restricted to a few censored/changed voices, right? Personally, the EU version of the dub doesn't make sense if that's the only thing there is to it. And when we talk about the US version, we're talking about the Xbox port dub?
 
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I think I see the issue now. I'm doing some tinkering with Shenmue II right now, as I do Shenmue 1 JP; I was talking about having a choice of ENG, JPN, EUR for Shenmue II. This is partially because I want to offer the most complete experience that I can, and partially because for Shenmue II things are a bit... trickier.

-ENTER AHX-

So, Shenmue II uses an audio format called AHX (more on this in a second) for (most) of it's voice files. For the rest of the voice files, we have good old STR. I've only looked at Japanese for Shenmue II this time, and it seems all Japanese files are identically named between both games (for the most part, there are inconsistencies; but I take this to be a result of the lineage from DC > Xbox > PC for Shenmue II; I'll figure out more on that eventually), Fortunately, lightning has struck twice and I managed to figure out the exact conversion process they used for this rerelease (and once again, many thanks to the Shenmue community, I don't have the name to credit here, but the tool that was used was found right here on the dojo... or rather, the old dojo, so... here, but not HERE here). On top of that, the issue I had with BGM01/02/03 struck again, but worse. It seems to apply to all files that are actually music; they just... seem to play something else. IE part 2 of the intro scene's music in Shenmue 1 becomes "Ryo-san", Joy's theme becomes the Shenmue theme, etc. I think I can just leave those, they don't sound particularly bad. I might also see if I can use a higher-bitrate xma in their stead as well.The goal -IS- as close to 1:1 as I can get.

Those are all small-fish problems at the moment though, right now my issue is with the English dub of Shenmue II; with all the inconsistencies, I really need to do the English dub first to find where they'd be. While I've found the "mix-ups" aren't THE SAME between EN/JP, they're generally in the same area (and JP has way more). If I know what scene is what in English, I can PROBABLY figure out how things should be fixed in JP.... and if anything confirms my hypothesis as to what I can do to fix the music-in-game issue, since I worry it won't be limited to music in Shenmue II.


I also want to be very, very, very clear about this. When I said music up above, I am not referring to the glitchy music that everyone has an issue with; this is a different issue, it's just that the way this game does sound, certain bits of the soundtrack fall under my purview; another example is the notebook theme. This project is primarily about the voiceover tracks. I left these tracks unfixed in Shenmue I pending my finishing of Shenmue II. It seems like it might be an issue I have to solve earlier than that.


tl;dr - You're confused because I was talking about Shenmue II and wasn't clear about it. Also, I'm doing Shenmue II
 
Sorry for the double post, just wanted to make sure this registers as unread for everyone as the Japanese dub is now released. The new dub can be found on the Nexus, and a link to the Nexus page can be found on the first post.
 
Holy shit that was sooner than expected! Guess I'll fire up Shenmue again...
 
Holy shit that was sooner than expected! Guess I'll fire up Shenmue again...


I'd actually say it's later than expected, I more or less took a break for a week or two because I got busy at work. Shenmue II should theoretically go pretty quick once I figure out what the hell is going on with the fixed audio. it keeps swapping files around and I'm not sure why. It's like the BGM0x.afs issue, but 10 times worse. If it wasn't for that, I was going to try and have something ready for tomorrow... Alas, it looks like that won't be the case, and Shenmue II is looking doubtful overall again =\

...but my opinion on this stuff changes every 5 minutes, and I have the next two days off so we'll see how I feel tomorrow
 
I've been playing Shenmue 1 with your mod, and damn, the difference is huge! Thank you for this amazing project!
Hope you'll manage to sort things out with Shenmue 2.

Also, you should put the Japanese dub on Mega too, since Nexus Mods has a pretty bad download speed limit.
 
I've been playing Shenmue 1 with your mod, and damn, the difference is huge! Thank you for this amazing project!
Hope you'll manage to sort things out with Shenmue 2.

Also, you should put the Japanese dub on Mega too, since Nexus Mods has a pretty bad download speed limit.

Too late for me, I'm just about to finish slowly downloading it :p Between this and @ner0 's 16:9 patcher, I'm excited to try out Shenmue again!
 
I messed up with the Forklift Loader the first time and put the DLLs and mods folder in the overall Shenmue folder instead of sm1 or sm2. For a few seconds I thought "Meh, all that work for nothing, still sounds the same." Then I realised my mistake, moved the DLLs to the right folder...

Holy shit. The difference is night and day. Bravo!
 
I just downloaded the japanese dub from Nexus and I can confirm the improvement is huge! I still hear some buzzing sounds at the end of some phrases, but I imagine this is related to the game and not this mod. I just have one question: I noticed the 02 folder that came in the .zip file is completelly empty, any reason to include it in the download?
 
I just have one question: I noticed the 02 folder that came in the .zip file is completelly empty, any reason to include it in the download?


That means I have to re-check the upload and it may be faulty
 
UPDATE: It seems I screwed up, and didn't pack Disc 2 in with the Japanese dub. This is now fixed; you can download the new version from the link above. I've also mirrored the Japanese dub on MEGA because of the slow download speeds from the nexus. You can also find that link at the Nexus.
 
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