Classic Fallout Music Restored - ESPless

Intro

FNV contains music tracks from the original Fallout 1 and 2 games. The files are mp3s encoded with decent settings (192 kbits, 48 kHz) but either the encoding process or sources used for those files were low quality, resulting in thin sound replete with artifacts from the bygone Napster-era of 128 kbit MP3s.

This is a high quality restoration of the Fallout 1 & 2 music, with all mp3s created from lossless rips of the original Mark Morgan Fallout 1 & 2 CDs (not the lower quality Vault Archives release many years later).

What this Mod Does

This is a simple file replacement mod wherein the original low quality Fallout 1 & 2 songs are replaced by higher fidelity versions that are volume matched to the original game files. To ensure the highest quality, the restored songs were made by transcoding lossless FLAC tracks to 224 kBit 48,000 kHz MP3s with simultaneous volume adjustments made during encoding. This single-pass method means that the lossless originals are not edited, nor are the MP3s created, edited, and re-compressed at a lower volume which would result in compounding loss of fidelity similar to when a jpeg is saved multiple times. Details at the bottom.

Why it Matters

Several other mods have tried to do this, but they used either low quality sources or poor encoding settings, resulting in music that is not perceptibly more clear than FNV's.

Recommended audio mods to pair with CFMR:

Thematic Location Music: thoughtful integration of classic FO1/2 music that also uses existing FNV music to make factions sound distinct

Classic Music Re-integrated: another thoughtful integration of classic music that also preserves some of FNV's tracks

Music Extraction: same as above

Hymn of The New West: re-imagined the entire FNV score with only classic FO1/2 music plus tracks from popular FO2 mods such as Sonora.

DSOAL - True 3D Sound for Headphones: not merely for headphones, restores EAX-like positional audio for 2. 0 up to 7. 1 systems.

Boring Technical Details

Lossless FLAC rips were sourced from the Fallout 1 CD and the Fallout 2 CD, not the Vault Archives copy. The Vault Archives copy - which is the common source for song replacer mods - is a bootleg release of upmixed Fallout 1 and 2 in-game audio assets and is of lower quality than the games' OSTs.

The highest quality sources for songs are direct rips from the original Fallout 1 and 2 CDs which are used here.

One-step transcoding from the lossless originals was done using ffmpeg

ffmpeg -i TRACK.flac -b:a 224k -ar 48000 -