Fallout 4 High Quality Audio

What is this mod?

This mod provides higher quality audio for the voices in Fallout 4 and all the downloadable content for Fallout 4 that has voices, using the PS4 audio as a source. The .esp files used in this mod are flagged as both .esl and .esm files, which means that you should not have to worry about hitting the .esp file limit when installing this mod.

Why?

Bethesda encoded the voices in the DLC for Fallout 4 using a lossy encoder called XWM at a low bitrate (probably 48kbps but I am not 100% certain on that) for the PC version of Fallout 4, which is at a low enough bitrate that there are audible artifacts from the encoding process. The voices in the DLC of Fallout 4 on the PS4 are encoded using AT9AC, a proprietary encoder from Sony, at a higher bit rate (probably 192kbps but not certain). The voice over audio from the DLC of the PS4 version of the game sounds good enough that you are no longer hearing the encoder, you are just hearing the voice actors' voice. So I used the audio files from the PS4 version of Fallout 4 and the DLCs, packed those files into separate .ba2 files for the base game and each DLC, and created .esp files so that the game will use the PS4 audio files instead of the PC ones.


Installation:

Installing using Mod Organizer 2:

• Download the files on the files tab of this mod page
• Launch MO2 and click on the icon with a CD and computer software box to install mods
• Locate where you downloaded the 'HQAudio0...' to 'HQAudio4...' 7Z files and click on open to install the mod
• On the left box in MO2, click on the checkmark box to activate the mod
• On the right box where the .esm files are shown, hold left click and drag the mods starting with 'HQAudio0...' to the very top of your mod list. The mods need to even be above Unofficial Fallout 4 Patch.esp, for example.
  

Installing manually:

• After downloading the files, extract the .ba2 files from all the 'HQAudio' 7Z files (you can ignore the .esp files if you are installing this mod manually) and put them into the 'Data' folder in your Fallout 4 installation directory (default directory location 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout 4\Data')
• Go to where your Fallout4.ini file is located at (default directory location 'C:\Users\<your user name here>\Documents\My Games\Fallout4' and open it with your text editor of choice
• Locate 'SResourceArchiveList2' which is under '[Archive]' (it should be at the top of your .ini file) and add the following at the end of the line: 
  

               HQAudio0 - Voices.ba2, HQAudio1 - voices_en.ba2, HQAudio2 - voices_en, HQAudio3 - voices_en.ba2, HQAudio4 - voices_en.ba2

So your SResourceArchiveList2 should look something like this:
SResourceArchiveList2=Fallout4 - Animations.ba2, HQAudio0 - Voices.ba2, HQAudio1 - voices_en.ba2, HQAudio2 - voices_en.ba2, HQAudio3 - voices_en.ba2, HQAudio4 - voices_en.ba2

Compatibility:

I haven't tested compatibility with any other mods, but I think this mod should be compatible with other audio mods. Since this mod is at the top of the mod load order, any mod that is lower in the order should overwrite the files in this mod.

Plans for next versions of this mod:

I know that there might be a few messed up files because there are some files that are named the same but have different audio and I deleted a few without knowing that they were actually different, so I will try and fix that problem and any other issues that folks post about on this page. I also plan on seeing if I can use the files from the lossless versions of the soundtracks for Fallout 4 and its DLCs in order to improve the audio quality of the music.

Changelog:

5/3/2023 - So I started a playthrough of Fallout 4 with my mod installed and realized that the differences in the voices I was hearing in the base game of Fallout 4 had to do with the voices using a different encoder, not because the audio files were encoded at a higher bit rate. I also noticed that some of the DLC voices were playing louder in the game than in the base game, but I compared the RMS values on Audacity of the files and they both came out nearly the same, so I am going to upload new versions of this mod using no compression on the .ba2 files to see if that fixes the problem. I am also combining the three parts of the Fallout 4 voices into one file, as I have tested this in game and it is running fine. 

5/5/2023 - I finally figured out why the mod was playing the audio files louder in the DLCs than in the base game! I do not know the reason why, but you have to use the naming convention of '[name of mod] - Voices.ba2' for the gain levels of the DLC voices to be the same as the gain levels of the base game voices. So I am going to upload a new version of the mod with the name changes of the .ba2 file for all the DLC.

5/10/2023 - I uploaded a new version of the High Quality Voices Base Game that uses no compression on the .ba2 file.

Special Thanks:

Thank you for all the voice actors that worked on Fallout 4 and its DLCs and to all the developers who worked on Fallout 4.

I wanted to thank sharrken, the creator of the 'Unofficial High Definition Audio Project' Skyrim Special Edition mod and Myania, the creator of the 'SSE High Quality Voices' Skyrim Special Edition mod for inspiring me to create this mod.

I am also very grateful that sharrken wrote down their workflow in the FAQ section of their description. Without that, I would have never been able to figure out how to go about creating this mod.

I also wanted to thank BowmoreLover for creating Yakitori Audio Converter.

Thank you to Rudi Rastelli for making PS3P PKG Ripper.

Thank you to XyLe for creating ATRACTool Reloaded.

Thank you to all the contributors of SoX.

Thank you to ElminsterAU for creating FO4Edit.

Lastly, I wanted to thank Linux Mint, because without it I might not have been able to get SoX working in Windows 11 to batch change the audio files from mono to stereo.