For the love of all that's holy please consider increasing the audio quality!
Hi,
I bought this game on Steam and the instant the music started playing in the menu my ears started to bleed from all the compression artifacts. I don't think I've heard a game with audio quality this bad since the late '90s when 22kHz audio was still the standard.
Had a quick look in the game files and sure enough at least the music appears to be stored as 80kbps Mp3 which is just horrendously bad, worse than regular internet radio. Never, ever compress using Mp3 with anything less than 128kbps because the quality loss will be noticeable on even mediocre speaker/headphones. Not sure what compression is used on the voice files but they don't sound good either, which is pretty sad in a game built around dialogue.
Really disappointed and surprised by this because I've not had this problem with the other Telltale games. I recently played through The Wolf Among Us and that sounded fine.
I suspect this compromised quality is another thing we can thank concurrent mobile development for, but please consider increasing the audio quality in the "desktop" versions of the game. This is really ruining the game for me to the point that I'm tempted to try a Steam refund for the first time, because I can't really enjoy the game like this anyway.
At the very least make sure to avoid this mistake in any future titles.
Thanks.
Comments
For the love of all that's holy get better audio devices? No one else has this
I've never had this issue with the game, all of it is very HD for me.
I never pay much attention to audio in video games (neither do I expect great results in this area) although I am an audiophile who cares more than I should when it comes to audio production in music. It's easy to hear that music in this game sounds pretty bad, even the intro songs that they use (especially Kiss the sky as I have that song in highest quality I could get, and I never got the rest of the songs so I can't claim anything about them). So in that case at least it's evident that bad mixing and/or mastering are at a fault, which honestly and sadly happens very often in today's music.
When you consider the amount of awfully sounding music out there which still sounds awful even if you rip it from your own CD or even download the legit 24bit versions, it's really, really not surprising you'll get bad audio in video games, too. But sure, 80 kbps mp3 is pretty awful and it's even worse when you do actually compress something that was already created as an audio mess.
In short, yes, it's sad that the world has come to this when it comes to digital audio, but no one really cares because if they did they would AT LEAST care about making "regular" music, which has nothing BUT audio to offer, at least acceptable sounding. Which brings me to my conclusion:
It's not surprising, and I try to avoid being bothered by it when it comes to video games. Just pay attention the the visual and the story itself, because it's really worth it!
Please check your facts and see if other people have the same problem before making a thread like this next time.
Relax, check your audio devices first, maybe you just plugged a toaster instead of speakers, happens to me sometimes.
What, is it weird, or something?
Nah, I plug toasters instead of my speakers in sometimes as well.
Uff, good to know, because I thought that I do something wrong.
Played it on PS4 and had no Audio issues (with 5.1 Headset). Also I watched a few streams on Twitch - recorded from PS4 and PC - and didn't notice any difference.
So maybe it's just your PC.
I agree with OP, you can hear the compression in the music tracks - and much more when they alone are played.
I've extracted all the sound files and was shocked to find they are all 80kbps!
My favorite tracks are the variations on Galatarium but it's appalling to hear all the artifacts.
TellTale plssss release your games with higher-quality audio, it's 2015 and a few extra gigabytes to the game size isn't unreasonable. If Titanfall can get away with 35GB of audio, I think your entire game sizes can be more than half of that.
my audios fine and whats wrong with internet radio i listen to vocaloid and anime related radios over tunein all the time and its fine
How can anyone in their right mind not hear that the music in this game is awfully compressed? It ruined so much fun for me. I couldn't believe my ears, all those compression artifacts, it sounded as if the bitrate was around 128 kbps. Now thanks to the comments here I actually know that It is even lower than that! That's unforgivable, we are living in modern age! Although I enjoyed the game itself, I will write negative Steam review. You don't respect your players if you compress sound like that.
Don't act like everybody has this problem, because it's pretty obvious most people don't. Writing a negative Steam review won't change that.
You got like one or two comments that agreed with you, must mean we all have that problem.
You sound like the worst hipster right now.
You know what you could do instead of complaining in a six month old thread? Try to get a refund. Like two or three people have this issue, not the entire fanbase. And I bet Telltale will care if one guy writes a negative review because...you're special, I guess? And no one cares about Steam reviews anyway.
Nice necrobump, there, matey.