[Remastered] SpongeBob SquarePants Battle for Bikini Bottom GBA Intro

Описание: An experiment that went too far, I present to you the intro track from the GBA game 'SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom' completely remastered to not sound completely distorted

Backstory:
I was originally asked to rip this soundtrack because the existing soundtrack uploads were waaaaaay overblown and distorted like crazy, but once I looked at the game myself I found that it (while not as distorted and loud as said uploads) was considerably distorted. I then ripped the ost exactly as the game presented it to me and called it a day. While it was still significantly better then the other rips, I felt like something could have been done about it. But I never had any time to look into it.

Recently though, for whatever reason, I decided to have a look into it. The very first thing I did was look at the settings as I needed to disable the sfx, but then I noticed the volume was at 100% and was a level adjustment instead of the usual ON/OFF gba games usually use. I turned it down to 50% and immediately found it wasn't distorted anymore, and was reasonably clean sounding. I could re-rip the soundtrack quieter and it would sound so much better. But there was one issue, the game uses a password system. What this meant is that I couldn't turn the game down until I got passed the intro screen/track, and I couldn't back out to it once I set the correct volume (I was not aware this track appeared in the credits until after this project). So that brings us to..

Memory editing! If I could find the addresses that control the volume, I could set it before I get to the title screen and get that clean non bass boosted intro track. After a bit of pocking around I managed to find the sound driver in ram and observed the value(s) that controlled the volume. But instead of a master volume value, I found 6 seperate channel volume controls. Immediately I realised I could do more than just record the track non distorted, I could export the individual tracks and give it a complete remaster! So I made some codebreaker codes to easily solo tracks and started recording all the channels seperately.

Once I had it all in my daw and everything setup, I could start mastering it. First thing I did was fix the clicking on the bass line, it wasn't audible at all when everything was distorted like crazy but once it was more clear sounding, the bass sample was getting cut off abruptly causing a popping/clicking sound every note. So I started smoothing the ends down on that, but as I worked on cleaning up the track, there was a glaring problem. The tracks recorded from the gba were each very noisy due to the aliasing of the gba. Every note/percussion would bring with it a tonne of noise, in some cases it was more noticeable than the sample itself.

If I wasn't already too far in the deep end of a game I didn't ever play properly of a series I've never watched (yeah I've never even seen an episode of spongebob, it is on my todo list tho dw), I was about to be. The only way I could clean up some of this noise was by extracting the raw samples from the rom and start re sequencing them.

Having the seperate tracks was really helpful while re-sequencing things. But as I slowly replaced the seperate tracks with sequenced versions, the remaining tracks with their noise bursts were extremely noticeable. I really had to just re-sequence absolutely everything to get away from the noise. Once that time consuming process was done it was just general production work after that. This track has been mastered at a standard -14 LUFS with plenty of breathing room for instruments. A few artistic liberties were taken here and there but it is generally as close to a clean version of the original as possible. It does roll off at about 6khz quite hard but thats due to the samples being stored somewhere around 6khz in rom (I don't know the exact value so I had to tune everything I exported very manually)

If I wasn't wasting enough time on this project already, I had to take it another step further with the video.. Just lots of ripping sprites and the map, animating them again and positioning it all up.

I learned a lot during this so I wouldn't consider it a waste of time, but I probably will not be doing any of the other tracks. One theory I have for why the soundtrack was as distorted as it was: This soundtrack was commisioned from Shin'en Multimedia, who composes music with their own inhouse sound engine called the "GAX Sound Engine." They then provide the studio with a compiled version of it to insert into their game. I originally thought it was to sound louder through the tiny gba speaker, but after doing all this research I believe the developers simply didn't realise that setting it to 100% volume by default was a bad idea and that limiting it to 50% internally as 100% would have sounded much better, as Shin'en Multimedia probably wasn't overseeing anything once it was handed off.

I am sorry for rambling up to the character limit :)

Enjoy!