Questions about Emulated Sound
 

Hi there, actually I have a lot questions about emulated sounds, Experts, please answer them :)

1. Is there any quality differences of emulated sound and their released soundtracks? Is converting PSF into MP3 degrades the quality?
2. Why Emulated sounds are so damn small? How come a PSF2 file is much2 smaller than mp3 while it has a lot of information about music? What's the difference between streamed sound of PS1 and PS2 sound driver? How come the streamed sounds in PS2 could be converted into small psf2 files?
3. What's the sound format of GC? Are they sequenced or streamed?
4. What's the difference between PSF and miniPSF?

I think I have more questions later... but I don't know which. Feel free to answer them. :)

1. First off, converting anything to mp3 will degrade the quality. So by default there should be a difference between a PSF and an mp3 ripped from an OST. Secondly, if you were to analyse a PSF rip with a WAV OST rip, you would still find differences, mostly due to sound emulation not being perfect.
2. As opposed to mp3, PSF files work in a tracker format like MIDI. Rather than getting all the instruments together and recording the output, tracker formats files contain the individual sounds used and placement information for those sounds. Or in two words - they're sequenced.
3. Not sure but I think they're sequenced.
4. PSF files contain the sounds used in the song and the placement information. miniPSF files just contain the placement information, and references the PSFlib file for the sounds.

The sound players and plugins that run these emulated songs are actually mini emulators. In the case of PSFs, for example, the Winamp plugin is actually emulating the Playstation's sound hardware and select portions of the Playstation's CPU. Each PSF is, in fact, a small PSX executable that runs only the sound data of one song. It varies according to the needs of each console, but this is roughly how it's done with every sound format.

The sound format for Gamecube emulation files are DSP/IDSP. The only place to get these files at the moment is the HCS torrent tracker (I forgot the link :/).

whew, nice answers, thanks TCK, but you haven't answered my question about why streamed tracks in PSF2 sound could be so damn small.

more questions then:
1. Is there any real difference in OST of games that actually released their tracks from the emulated sound with the psf set? which one is much better?
2. How do VGM composers compose? What instruments they use actually?
3. What is "manipulator"?

That's all for today. Thanks before! :)

Oops, I didn't, did I?

Like I was eluding to previously, it's pretty much a sequenced format. Only thing PSF files contain are the soundfonts and the sequence information. The latter takes very little, and the size of a PSF will largely depend on quality/quantity of soundfonts. On average they're pretty damn small.

As for 1, I think it's down to personal preference, but I would say an OST over a rip.

I corrected my statement about psf2 being so damn small. Just yesterday I was surprised to see a psf2 rip from katamari damancy. Wow, it's 13 mb in size. o.O

I have seen streamed PSF2s (like in the case of the raw 100MB KH2 PSF2 set, with both versions of Passion), but they generally are much smaller than the wav files would be. Genesis and SNES rips are where it's at, it's not uncommon to see four CDs worth of Genesis VGM music in a 4MB package.