GYO6161 wrote: I knew compressed audio was what we were getting. While it's known Sega still has Ryo's English lines uncompressed i highly doubt they also have every single uncompressed line from the close to one a thousand NPCs throughout both games in both languages so its understandable.
Based on the quality in the reveal trailer, I agree, it seemed likely. But I suspect that they probably still have all of the audio assets, everything. At that point data storage was already pretty cheap so why destroy them? The audio in the final game is also in different frequencies already. Don't quote me on this because it's from memory and I didn't re-verify, but the FREE audio (non-cutscene) in Shenmue 2 is 8khz, while the cutscene voices are all 11khz.
If it were me, and I'm not them, I would've probably kept two things so that I wouldn't need duplicates:
1. The original master dailies
2. The final build assets
The final build assets would already be downsampled and compressed, so that's no good if you want to improve them. But the original master dailies, the raw recordings from each day in the studio, would be long continuous recordings of lines. If that's what they still have, they'd have to split apart every single line again and match them up with the original clips. That's a lot of work. Audio matching and splicing is a process that can be partially automated, (think along the lines of how Shazam can detect audio) but someone still needs to manually review everything because you can't be perfect when you're not comparing identical things. Then you still have to assemble the new assets into AHX containers.
With what we learned today, these new ports are consistent with Sega's other Dreamcast-era ports like Crazy Taxi & Sonic Adventure 2.