I’ve updated Telltale Speech Extractor again and this one is quite a significant change. Investigating a bug report that the speech in the German version of Sam and Max 101 was exporting at a lower quality I took the time to dive into my 19 year old VOX decoding code.
It turns out that the German dub of Sam & Max 101 is indeed stored in a higher quality than the original English one but unfortunately it also showed that some of my assumptions in decoding the original VOX format werent quite right. Most of the VOX speech in the early games was stored as 32kHz ultra-wideband Speex but I was extracting as mere wideband 16kHz Speex. Its not massive, but this does affect the quality of the outputted sound. So speech is now saved at its full samplerate and therefore quality in the VOX games: Sam & Max Season 1 and 2, Bone, CSI 3 Dimensions of Murder, Texas Hold’em, Strong Bad, Wallace & Gromit, Tales of Monkey Island, Hector, Jurassic Park, Law & Order, Poker Night At The Inventory.
Tied to this was an incorrect assumption based on the narrowband/wideband mixup that made me think all the VOX data was stereo. Turns out its almost all mono with a tiny few that are actually stereo. So most VOX files are now saved as mono. The few that really are stereo (mostly sound effects in Bone: The Great Cow Race and Texas Hold’em) are now saved in proper stereo.
I was also able to spot and fix a rare issue where VOX games with unencrypted audio files sometimes still have the odd file that is actually encrypted. These few files previously had issues with the odd burst of noise in them – these files are now decrypted when appropriate and sound fine again.
Download it here.
