Ikachan OST - Restored and Remastered

Greetings, been a while since I posted here.

I did this a while back, but I figured you guys might like it - I made a new remaster of the Ikachan OST. Basically, this project happened because I wanted to have Ikachan's OST on my phone, which sounded easy enough... but every version of the game's OST I could find had multiple issues, mainly it being at the wrong speed, having severe audio quality issues, or even both! Even the version on cavestory.org isn't perfect, as I feel it suffers from loudness issues, and my players not liking the .flac files at all (in the case of the song Ikachan, at least). Dissatisfied with seeing mangled versions of the game's OST everywhere, I took it upon my own hands to painstakingly re-record the entire game's OST, as well restore it as best as I could. In short, I recorded the music being played in Piyo Piyo to ensure it is at the correct speed, with a audio resolution of 24-bit/48khz. Then I used a combination of SOUND FORGE Audio Studio 12.6 and Audacity to clean and button up the audio for each song. There is still a minor amount of hiss, but this is inherent to the samples and trying to remove it would have compromised the audio, so I left it as is.

Was the recording and finishing it at 24-bit/48khz necessary? Probably not. But damn does it sound great. Hopefully if anyone is in the same situation, my version of the OST will be of help.

Links are below.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqPqqf1AIs9Q307XBgoYXo01jQqanLapi

FLAC download: https://archive.org/details/ikachan-ost

 

Interesting, hearing the song in higher quality makes some of the instruments a lot clearer (like, the bass in Buriki was always pretty loud, now it's kind of overpowering) Either way, i respect the effort you put in the restoration!

to be honest, I thought you were using PiyoPiyoPlayer for a bit, until i ran a few songs in PiyoPiyo and saw them run at the same speed. Apparently the songs just sound like they're faster than they should be, kind of losing the underwater mystique they could've had. Though, that could just be my perception being ruined after i listened to the slower versions of the songs included in Ikachan V1

 

I matched them up with the latest version of the game on PC, which I'd imagine is how most people here experienced the game anyhow. To approximate the 3DS version just slow down the tempo a notch in your media player. If there's enough interest I could also make a version based on the V1 versions of the songs.

And funny on PiyoPiyoPlayer. I think it has a bug that plays the songs faster than they should. It was a major stumbling block when I first set out to do this.

 

and my players not liking the .flac files at all (in the case of the song Ikachan, at least)

Can you elaborate on this? Which players?

 

Can you elaborate on this? Which players?

VLC didn't seem to like them that much, though foobar handled them a bit better.