Ice Age (GBA) by jeangene91 at 11:01 AM EDT on November 3, 2018
I would like to rip the music from this game. Using "gba_mus_riper" on the .gba file doesn't produce anything. Given the small size of the file, I am not even sure there is anything there to extract.
> "Given the small size of the file, I am not even sure there is anything there to extract."
What? Unless the game was totally silent, there clearly is extractable stuff there.
by abuse of circ at 10:24 PM EDT on November 3, 2018
gbsmusriper is for use with games that utilized the default sound driver, sometimes known as "sappy" (due to the earliest research on it centering around Pokemon Sapphire, and then Caitsith2's ripping program being called Saptapper). It also goes by "M4A" and a couple other things. As far I can tell, the most accurate name for it is MusicPlayer2000, based on a program of the same name included with the official SDK. So sometimes you see it called "MP2K".
This means that you can't really use gbamusriper on any game that doesn't have a GSF set available. Although some GSF sets use other engines, so those games aren't compatible either.
Looking at the credits, it seems the music was composed by Manfred Linzner of Shin'en Multimedia, using the GAX sound driver common to most (all?) GBA games Shin'en worked on. If you poke around the forum, you'll find a list of all the games that use GAX.
You'll also find a lot of frustration, because only a handful of GAX games have been ripped to GSF, since the job has to be done manually - no tools that I know of will help with finding, extracting and making sense of the relevant data. The half-dozen GAX-using games that have been ripped (like both Iridions) took time and work.