Sonic Sounds Complete

[Mr Lange]

Made this last year. Decided to submit these to Sounds Resource because I'm sick to death of the low quality Sonic game samples in circulation. Copied post from Sonic Retro:

Hi Retro, it is I, the great and noble Lange.
I took it upon myself to rip sounds from every classic Sonic game into samples. I have noticed too many faults with other attempts to rip Sonic sounds, most commonly being poor sample rate. I ensured these sounds to be high quality and as accurate as possible.

Update: Sonic Advance 1, 2, 3, and Sonic Battle have been added. Also, fixed the spindash rev sound in Sonic Spinball with an HQ filtered version.

Here is the full archive:
Sonic Sounds Complete

Games covered (individual downloads):
Sonic 1
Sonic 2
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
Sonic 3D Blast
Sonic Spinball
Sonic CD
Knuckles Chaotix
Sonic Triple Trouble
Sonic Advance
Sonic Advance 2
Sonic Advance 3
Sonic Battle
Misc - Various Jingles

Here is the text in the readme file. It explains this project in great detail, so please read or at least skim through it before any questions, as it covers about everything obvious and not so obvious.

Spoiler

These sound rips have been brought to you by Mr Lange. Credit is not at all required, but would be appreciated.
I have come across various sound rips from the original Sonic games, all of which are either terrible quality (horrible sample rate) or have at least one glaring flaw.
In my frustration, I decided to rip them all myself. I will say with confidence I've done a much better job.
Aside from poor sample rate, what I notice is how others ignore the emulator they use and its settings. Usually ignored:
The internal sample rate. Should be 44100.
Soften filter. Should be OFF.
YM2612 HQ Emulation. Should be ON.
These are the ideal settings. Special options vary among emulators, which makes it worse when sounds are ripped with an emulator with more junk food features than quality design.

Games Ripped:
Sonic 1
Sonic 2
Sonic 3 and Knuckles
Sonic 3D Blast
Sonic Spinball
Sonic CD
Knuckles Chaotix
Sonic Triple Trouble
Sonic Advance
Sonic Advance 2
Sonic Advance 3
Sonic Battle

For these rips I used Gens Rerecording 11b, which seems to be a very mature version of Gens, and also allows me to set every shortcut key making these tasks a little easier. Testing sounds in comparison with other emulators, this one appears to be closest to perfection.
However, I used Kega Fusion for Knuckles Chaotix, which as far as I know, is the only emulator which correctly emulates 32x sound. In comparison, Kega Fusion's 32x sound emulation was far superior to Gens 11b, however every Genesis game sounded identical between the two emulators. Thus for all of its other features, Gens 11b won out for every other game.
As sort of a bonus, I decided to rip Sonic Triple Trouble, since it has a convenient sound test, and I have yet to find sound rips of any of the Game Gear/Master System Sonic games. I think the sounds are mostly the same between these games anyway. For this game, I used Kega Fusion, because it directly supports GG/SMS games, has accurate sound emulation, and wav dumping.
I didn't do very thorough research so I could be off with my decision to use these emulators. If anyone knows better than me, please tell me what would be the best method. I will gladly do all of this again in favor of more accurate, better quality results.

These rips are very unbiased. I did not name any of the sound files by concept (jump, ring, spindash. etc), just by their numbers in the games' sound tests. The file names are short, abbreviations of the game name followed by the sound number. If you want to name them, go ahead.
I also did not make any attempts to remove doubles. Every sound effect possible is there. There are quite a few doubles though, between different games and sometimes even the same game will contain doubles. It would take too long to try and weed out all the doubles, and I would not want to compromise the integrity of these rips. If you want to do this, it too is the end user's responsibility. Also, there is a possibility that there are tiny variations in some of the doubles across games, given differences in sound engines and what not. I do not know for sure.
One exception though, I only ripped the few sounds from Sonic 3D Blast that I was sure are unique to that game. There's dozens of sounds which appear to be directly copied from Sonic 3 and Knuckles, even in the same order, so I didn't bother. If there are any other sounds unique to 3D Blast that I overlooked, let me know.
I should also mention that every ring sound is always stereo left or right. The normal ring sounds alternate, but some of the doubles are fixed on one side. For every ring sound, I manually copied the one used channel to the silent one so they would play on both sides.

You may notice the "sustain" folder in the S3&K rips. This is because there's a section of sounds from BC to DB that play differently depending on repetition. Playing once, they are short, some of which on release will decay in volume. If they are played repeatedly very quickly, they continue playing a special looped version. Some of these are simple loops, while others are long morphing sounds. I had no technical method for determining how long to sustain these sounds, I just used intuition, hoping to capture the loops a few times over for each sound along with any nonlooping morphing over time, until the sound showed no changes following a certain point. In other words, the normal rips are "one shot" versions while the sustain folder has the extended sustained/looping versions. I did not attempt to add any markers or loop points, so if needed, it will be up to the end user.

The Sonic Spinball rip was a little sketchier than the others, and some sounds required a little manual editing. I did listen for and ignore doubles for this game's rip. There were a lot of sounds that have permanent loops, so I used careful judgement on how they should be trimmed in a way that preserves slow modulations over time, as well as ensuring that they are loopable. There are a couple sounds that had minor variations with each play, such as the cluck sound (51, 52, 53), so I ripped these multiple times and singled out the most prominent variations. Sound 60 is a long version of the steam launcher gimmick in Lava Powerhouse. In the game, the sound actually stops after a few repetitions and is followed by another sound, which is 63 in this rip. Therefore, I ripped and studied the original sound, and manually combined 60 and 63 exactly as it is in the game, which is 60b. Its possible the game variates it slightly, but my edit should be the best possible average. Also, the spindash rev sound, 65, loops in the game, rising in pitch with every iteration. The custom sound test I used does not do this, only playing the sound once. For this, I did a manual vgm rip and rendered the complete version of the sound, which is 65b. I should also mention that sound 64, the plane sound that plays during the Sega logo, actually loops forever in the sound test, but I trimmed it to exactly the point it stops in the game.

The Sonic Misc folder has common jingles from the games. I gave these samples proper names. The jingles between Sonic 1 and 2 are pretty much the same, albeit tiny differences. I left them in together for the sake of completeness. Chaotix's "Decision" and "From Party to Party" are infinitely looped by the game, so I attempted to trim these manually to their approximate loop points to my best ability. I may be off a few samples, but I preserved the illusion. I feel I must warn about this as it is the most biased edit in this project. Also, I did not rip Sonic Triple Trouble's jingles, as I felt it would be unfair to rip those and not every GG/SMS game's jingles which are all different. To do this would take too much time, especially considering not every game has a sound test. They are available in emulated soundtracks on other sites, such as Zophar's Domain, and easy to convert.
Note, the jingles for collecting all emeralds and gaining a continue are part of the sound effects, and not included in the jingles folder.
Another note, I did not separate Sonic Spinball's jingles from its sounds folder. It was too difficult to determine what does and doesn't count as a jingle since the game has many different kinds.

The Sonic Advance rips are more recent. They were not ripped from an emulator as the rest were. Instead, these were converted from raw sequence rips. These rips totally bypass the GBA's sound output and come right from the internal data, so they're not only clean and free of that poor sample rate conversion that the GBA does, but include more than you could ever get from their in-game sound tests. I removed empty samples, hence some of the missing numbers. There's a lot of repeated sounds between the Advance games, and like with the other rips, I did not attempt to remove doubles. I did not rip jingles for the GBA games, since there's a way more of them and I can't even identify them all.

Every sound is:
wav format
44,100 hz
Stereo
16 bit

Every sound (except those from the GBA games) was batch processed by Sound Forge, using the auto trim plugin. The settings were careful about only cutting silence and leaving 1 ms of time before and after every sample.
Kega ripped sounds a bit quieter. Knuckles Chaotix is thus a bit quieter than the other games. Triple Trouble was especially quiet, so every sample from that game was given a volume increase of a few dbs during the batch process. I did not modify the volume of Chaotix's sounds though, because some of the sounds are loud enough that they might clip. Anything less wouldn't be worth it. I will not normalize the sounds individually because the volume differences between the sounds is important and also part of the integrity of this ripping project. Otherwise I might as well normalize the volume of every sound from every game. This would be destructive. The end user can opt to do that on their own.

Updates:
-Jan 25, 2012
Initial release.
-Feb 06, 2012
I'm happy to report that I was finally able to properly rip Sonic Spinball's sounds, thanks to GenesisFan64 who shared a custom hack that runs a raw sound test. Using this, I was able to accurately rip the game's sounds just as I have with every other game, thus unofficially completing this project (not every possible thing is done yet, but basically this is completed). See above for notes on the Sonic Spinball rip.
I also fixed one or two tiny issues I missed, as well as a big mistake I made. I accidentally left behind repeats in a couple of the jingles that I was going to examine, and I forgot to do that and edit them, so I took care of that.
-Oct 05, 2012
With some breakthroughs in GBA sample ripping done by Tanks, I was able to add sound effects from Sonic Advance 1, 2, 3, and Battle in unparalleled quality. I also fixed the spindash rev sound from Sonic Spinball with an HQ corrected one, so now it sounds as its supposed to.

Anyway, it goes without saying these sounds are for any purpose. Hopefully fan games will sound less shitty from now on. Have fun.
I would like any feedback. Did I miss anything? Did I do anything wrong or suboptimally?
Again, credit is appreciated but not necessary.

Thanks to GenesisFan64 for helping rip Sonic Spinball's sounds by way of creating a custom sound test for the game's sounds. Additional thanks to MarkeyJester for the suggestion, and lukeusher123 for his original work on the custom sound test.
More thanks go to Tanks from Sonic Retro for devising a new method of extracting GBA sounds and sequences. His raw sequence rips of the Sonic games on GBA were converted and added to this collection.


Mr Lange

My name on Sonic Retro and Sonic Fan Games HQ is also Mr Lange.
[email protected]
Youtube: shortfactor
Newgrounds: Short-Factor

In summary:
Uses emulators with accurate sound emulation and proper settings.
Rips every sound in each game's sound test, with little to no bias, ignoring doubles and only naming by number.
Has additional material such as S3&K's sustainable sounds and various jingles.
Every sound is cropped and no normalization is used on volumes, to preserve the true volume differences between sounds.
Every sound is 44100, Stereo, 16 bit.

I would like to add that soundtracks for these games can be acquired in vgm format and rendered to wavs or mp3s. For those who don't know, vgm is an emulated format. It stores the music data the same way the games do, and thus the file sizes are tiny, but they are rendered in real time as if played right out of the console, so they are also the highest quality solution. I mention this not just because its useful information, but certain tunes and jingles from these games can be acquired this way. This covers the GG/SMS games' jingles not included here.

Use the in_vgm for playing vgm/vgz files. It is compatible with Winamp and XMPlay.
Such soundtracks in this format can be found at:
Project 2612 for Genesis games.
SMS Power for Game Gear and Master System games.
Zophar's Domain (the music section) for other GG/SMS games missing from SMS Power. Don't trust this site for its Genesis rips though as they do not seem to be as properly made as Project 2612's.

You might have already noticed that emulated formats span other consoles as well. If you make a point of moving to these for your game soundtracks instead, they'll shave off hundreds of mb on your disk used up by mp3s, and you'll have them in perfect quality.

Well there it is fellas. I would like to hear your thoughts.