Track order and sound quality

I was wondering, for the games that have MSU-1 support, is the music stored in the game in the same order that the PCM tracks that are in? Or are they stored how whomever adds MSU-1 support to a game, decides the order of the tracks should be in? Is it possible to change the order?

For the SNES games that have a soundtrack released on CD, is anyone aware of any CD soundtrack that is of higher quality on the disc than it is on the game itself? I was thinking this since I have some OSTs for some SNES games, and was wondering if the bitrate and quality would be higher on the CD that is on the game, perhaps I could use that instead of the in game SPC for the same soundtrack at a higher quality? Or it wouldn't matter?

Aisu Kuremu wrote:I was wondering, for the games that have MSU-1 support, is the music stored in the game in the same order that the PCM tracks that are in? Or are they stored how whomever adds MSU-1 support to a game, decides the order of the tracks should be in? Is it possible to change the order?

For the SNES games that have a soundtrack released on CD, is anyone aware of any CD soundtrack that is of higher quality on the disc than it is on the game itself? I was thinking this since I have some OSTs for some SNES games, and was wondering if the bitrate and quality would be higher on the CD that is on the game, perhaps I could use that instead of the in game SPC for the same soundtrack at a higher quality? Or it wouldn't matter?

You can not change the PCM track number unless you do some coding. I can already tell you that our coders are not going to take the time to change track order. Most PCM tracks go in the order of how they are located in game, which often feels random.

If you need to listen to PCM to know what track is what, my tutorial has instruction at the end how to listen to PCM on computer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmt4ddljCPQ

If you want to make new PCM, check out these tutorials:
https://www.zeldix.net/t2687-creating-a-pcm-track-for-msu-1

As for the CD quality better than SNES quality, I am not sure. It wouldn't surprise me to say "yes, a little" but I really do not know.

Let me know if there is any other questions we can answer for you, I am happy to help.

Aisu Kuremu wrote:For the SNES games that have a soundtrack released on CD, is anyone aware of any CD soundtrack that is of higher quality on the disc than it is on the game itself? I was thinking this since I have some OSTs for some SNES games, and was wondering if the bitrate and quality would be higher on the CD that is on the game, perhaps I could use that instead of the in game SPC for the same soundtrack at a higher quality? Or it wouldn't matter?

It wouldn't matter. You can't improve on the quality that comes directly from the SNES itself, as its output specs are 16-bit/32kHz. CD quality is 16-bit/44.1kHz. You're not gaining anything by upsampling or recording a 32kHz source at 44.1kHz. The restoration projects where people find the original samples used and recreate the track without the limitations of having to trim and downsample instruments to suit the restrictions of the SNES' APU, is a much better way of improving the quality of original SNES soundtracks.

Commercial CD releases of soundtracks often added a lot of post-processing like EQ and more reverb. They may sound "better" to most peoples ears, but they're not really a true representation of what you hear when playing the game itself.

as far as "are a game's internal tracklists in order" the answer can only be "sometimes."

if the game has an easy to pick apart internal scheme where you can look at the pointer and see 1 2 3 4 5 6 etc then those are usually left alone. if a game does not do such a thing then tracks get assigned a number via look-up table, to stop the tracklist from looking like
msu-25.pcm
msu-64.pcm
msu-170.pcm

Usually (for my patches) I set up a look up table in the order that the tracks appear in on Zophar's SPC archive for the game has them.