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by weezy_Archive
Last night I was remembering this goddamn Morricone soundtrack and how awesome it is, and how shitty it is that the original masters were lost/stolen/destroyed/who knows. The bootleg CD I bought ~20 years ago was alright - whoever made it did a good job editing all the content together cohesively, but they really took a crap on the audio itself. I assume they were using some kind of primitive noise reduction plug-in or something from that era, which turned it into murky sounding, badly-encoded-to-digital lo-fi mush. Or was it a transfer from an old worn-out VHS tape, laserdisc, etc?I had a SADiE 24/96 DAW at my disposal back then, so I dumped the whole thing into it and tried to re-master/improve the sound quality. It didn't help much listening to it now, it's maybe 10% better.I found the movie on youtube that seemed to have a decent audio track, and converted the stream to a mono 320 kbps mp3. Direct A/B was pretty interesting, the ripped youtube soundtrack had more clarity/definition, even though it's mono, and who knows what fucking compression youtube is doing to the audio stream. The old CD had ~20ish pieces of music (the rest are just snippets of dialog from the movie). The youtube rip had double that if you counted all the little vignettes, etc.I'm not sure if they had another source other than the movie when the CD was originally put together, because some of the tracks seem to be clean without SFX/dialog from the movie - on a few tracks I suspect they did some heavy editing/looping to achieve this. I poked around a little to find out what really happened to the original tapes (I could've sworn I read somewhere a few years back that they were lost in a fire), and found this.https://www.amazon.com/Ennio-Morricone-Danger-Diabolik-Complete/dp/B00JAJVGBOIt's a fine effort at a 'tribute', but there's some lame sounding MIDI/samples sprinkled in, which alone is bad juju to my ears....it doesn't hold a candle to the energy of the original score. Fucking guy was on fire back then.Anyway, that's how I wasted a good chunk of my Saturday