Unofficial High Definition Audio Project

Unofficial High Definition Audio Project

Update to 1. 0 is to signify completion of the project and coalesce version numbers across languages, no need to update (apart from if you downloaded UHQ Audio before 2018-07-17)

What is this?

A high-definition restoration of Skyrim's original voices and music, drawing from the much higher quality PS4 audio as a source.

YouTube Comparison video:

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Be aware that the YouTube file will have been re-compressed on upload, thus impacting quality a bit.

Link to some comparisons on soundcloud.

Bethesda encoded Skyrim's voices and music as 48kbit XWM files (Skyrim SE's fx sounds are uncompressed WAV files). This level of compression has a pronounced audible impact on the quality of the recording - making both music and voices sound flat, tinny, and lacking in range.

In the above animated spectrogram, you can see a visualization of the differences. All the blue patches that are there in Vanilla, but not in UHDAP, is sound that has been completely lost to the low quality compression of Vanilla. In some areas (bottom 1/4) Vanilla is a brighter orange, which means it is louder; this distorts the sound, giving a less clear bass. (please open in a new tab, or using the media viewer above for the best comparison)

In the below example of a Male Nord voice file, you can see the drastic effects of the compression in Vanilla - huge sections are missing or are simplified to rectangles - and how much closer UHDAP is to the PS4 files. (again, please view full size for a better comparison )

This mod fixes this, by using the high quality PS4 audio as a base, and carefully processing to retain as much quality as possible while making it perfectly integrate into the modded Skyrim ecosystem. It uses files loudness-matched to vanilla, and packed as .bsa for compatibility and fast loading.

Upon completion of this project, all Bethesda released languages apart from Chinese will be supported (I sadly don't have access to the Chinese copy of the game). That includes English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish.

Installation:

TL;DR: 

[]Download HQ Music and your respective language - all parts! You only need one language.

[]Install as normal with a mod manager of your choice, MERGE, not replace.

[]If using Mod Organizer/Vortex, place the .esp's in your load order just below the DLC, and ABOVE ANYTHING ELSE, including USSEP. As high as you can go basically.

[]Optional instructions on the sResourceArchiveList2 load method to avoid any .esp's are below. <