Hi everyone,

after all the upgrades the recording chain had the last months, I figured out it was time to sit down and spend some time on the Megascript, which is an automated software that produces the downsampled versions of our releases, FLAC and MP3.

So I started listening to some FLACs and decided that the quality wasn’t up to our standards and something had to be done about it. Yesterday I took the Megascript and made some substantial mods along with updated tools (SoX and ffmpeg) and the results were really encouraging.
To an untrained ear, now the differences between the 96/24 FLACs and standard resolution FLACs are really hard to catch, meanwhile those with higher end setups and good ears will still manage to pick some small differences here and there.
All in all it’s been a nice improvement in quality and I’m really happy about it.
Some of you may think that I only care for the higher resolution material and don’t give a damn about everything else but that’s not really the case.
Our goal is to set new, higher standards to videogame rips quality as we DO want to keep this high standard among all our formats.
So, yeah, we do care about you guys downloading the FLACs and MP3s, you’re not B Tier. ;-]

On a personal note, MP3s still sound bad to my ears, but that might be just me: I hate the MP3 format with a passion as it uses a very destructive algorithm.
I’d love to ditch the MP3 format and switch to AAC which, on the other end, is pretty legit but most of you have softwares and portable players that doesn’t support AAC, so I guess we’ll be stuck with MP3.

That’s pretty much it.
Expect to hear better quality FLACs and MP3s from the next release on (that include Remasters!).

On a side note on Remasters: I decided to put the Sonic games as maximum priority. Those were ripped from the games’ sound test mode and the Mega Drive’s VDP injected a lot of white noise in them and quality has suffered greatly from this.
I’m sorry for those who already requested some Remasters but this time I decided to make an exception and push other releases first.
The affected games are:

Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
Sonic the Hedgehog 3
Sonic & Knuckles
Sonic 3D (this one in particular is terrible)

Sonic Spinball was among the first ones to be ripped with the new method thanks to DeadFish Shitware’s native VGM Player. As such, it will be queued after all the requests.

Thanks for sticking with us and stay tuned for a new release (hopefully) next week!