First post, by SpeedySPCFan
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- Member
Hi all,
One of my weird projects recently has been trying to restore the original music of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, an early 2000s visual novel with a very... bizzare, soundtrack? The soundtrack can be split into basically two halves, both sets of royalty free music: half of the music was done by a company called AI-D-IA and came from a royalty free music pack in 22kHz, 8-bit, stereo WAV. All of THAT music was composed on a Korg Trinity which I've been slowly working on restoring:
Restore: https://soundcloud.com/speedyongaku/orenji-restore
Original: https://youtu.be/Yan1F5U63r8
Now the second half of the soundtrack is a bit more confusing. The music was done by a guy name of K. Kusaragi, going under the alias NERVE, who distributed his music for free, with a commercial use license requiring the client to first request permission. All of the tracks were distributed as MIDI files for Yamaha XG and Roland GS synths, which... being that Higurashi was a very, very budget production, the creator, Ryukishi07, didn't own. So roughly half of Higurashi's soundtrack was recorded on some unknown GM-compatible sound card, with awful clipping and compression, and slapped into the game. For a while it eluded me what sound card was being used, and by accident, finally found out yesterday it's a Creative Labs card!
...probably. One of the pianos in the soundtrack matched up EXACTLY with the one in one of Creative's 4MB factory sound fonts (I believe it's either for the AWE64 or AWE32), and some of the strings seem to be identical.
So, a quick request for anyone here who happens to own any of the following sound cards:
SB AWE32
SB32
SB AWE64
Creative AudioPCI (APCI and Live/Audigy are both deconfirmed, thanks Wanderer)
SB Live!
...or any other Creative sound card with General MIDI compatibility and samples...
Is it possible to record the two attached .MID files on them and post the result here? My goal is to try and figure out exactly what card was used so I can narrow down the time period the samples came from, and, assuming it's anything but the AudioPCI, find the original uncompressed samples on an E-MU synth or sound library to record the music with the same sounds but in far greater quality. If it IS the AudioPCI, then... well, I guess I have to go down the rabbit hole of Ensoniq samplers and synths.
Many thanks to anyone who helps :3
P.S. Sorry if this is the wrong section, I figured since this was talking about sound cards and sounds it may be appropriate :x
Musician & music gear/game reviewer.
MIDI hardware: JD-990, SC-55, SC-880, SD-90, VL70-m, Motif ES, Trinity, TS-10, Proteus 2000, XK-6, E6400U