A way to mute individual PSF channels by rcsb at 7:48 AM EDT on April 19, 2019
Someone could introduce me a way to listen to isolated PSF channels of PS1 sequenced music, aside from AudioOverload? Don't know why, but I can't listen to Crash Team Racing music on this software, it doesn't produce any sound. Foobar and Winamp plugins doesn't offer that option to mute channels like it does, unfortunately. ANY help is very appreciated.
P.S.: this is the first PSF file that I can't play on AO. Mega Man 8, Alundra, even Crash Bash plays totally fine and I can isolate them all. Don't really understand the problem.
You can do it with viopsf, using the included Peops SPU plugin. Enable "developer debug mode" in the SPU settings, then close and re-open the configuration window and a "sound debug screen" will pop up where you can mute channels.
I think Crash games have had issues in some PSF decoders. In viopsf, they recently (2018-02-25) fixed Crash 2 / 3 so hopefully Crash Team Racing should work.
Hey, Nisto, thanks for the answer! But I just figured this would work in an emulator, right? I my case, I wanted to be able to "rip" each channel separately to a WAV file, or at least be able to listen to each of them isolated, so I could record them to an audio file. I imagine that in CTR, I would not be able to do in-game, in an emulator, that without recording SFX as well? Maybe you could help me doing that? Thanks a lot, really!
At least in foobar2000, you can convert the individual channels to separate WAV files. It might be a bit cumbersome, but...
1. Open the Peops debug screen 2. Press "M1" at the bottom to mute all channels 3. Unmute the specific channel you want to convert 4. While keeping the debug screen open with your desired channels isolated, right-click the PSF and convert it to WAV
Note that you must STOP (not pause) PSF playback before converting, as foo_input_viopsf is not a multi-instance component, so it would not progress.
If you want something that's more convenient, you might just have to write a program of your own.
Nisto, do you have any kind of messenger, like Telegram or such, even an intern email message system, through you could help me out? I can't even manage to play the PSF files on Foobar as of now, it seems I'm making some obvious mistake and I can't figure out how to fix it. Please, it's very important. Already, thanks a hole lot!
To be more precise, when I open the config window of viopsf, it shows me this. But the box (red) to select the SPU plugin is like this and I can't really select anything, also the button to configure the plugin (blue) does not work. Do I need to put some folder that came in the zip file anywhere?
Also, PSF files are not being played even after I install the foo_input_viopsf.dll file. The plugin shows up on foobar, installed, but nothing plays, I receive "Unable to open item for playback (Unsupported file format)"
I'm usually on VGMdb's IRC channel (#vgmdb @ irc.psigenix.net). You can also contact me by PM on VGMdb's website if you want.
You need to copy the DLL files from the "SPUplugin_for_viopsf" folder and "viopsf.bin" directly into the "foo_input_viopsf" folder that you'll find in foobar2000's "components" or "user-components" folder. That's probably why the dropdown list is empty.
It worked! But when I do the procedure, like you said, the exported channels doesn't seems to add up correctly. Basically, when I play everything together, it's a mess. Any clues on what is causing this?
I haven't tested this personally, but it could be that silence at the beginning causes viopsf to drop the sample data of some channels, thus causing a desync (I assume that's what the "mess" is?). Try setting "skip silence on start" and "detect silence" to 0.
Good luck with that. Most, if not all xSF sequenced music, no matter the console, utilize some form of dynamic channel allocation, so you'll have to mute channels in the source sequences, not on the emulated sound chips. And even if you do mute the emulated sound chip channels, if it's not an undetectable mute, the player library will probably do funny things when it doesn't detect channels playing properly, and you will end up with desync that way, too.
(Undetectable mute: It silences the output, but continues to actually play audio internally, running the envelope generator, and sample pointer, and eventually ending after a note off command. Still sort of detectable, if something is wasting cycles checking what's ending up in the reverb buffer.)
The thing is, kode 54, until now I was perfectly able to do that: get a PSF, run it through AudioOverload, isolate and convert each channel to a WAV file, put all of them on Audacity and they would be perfectly synced, no noted missing or out of place. I did that with Alundra, Crash Bash, Mega Man 8, just to nam a few. I only had problems with Crash Team Racing. AudioOverload doesn't play any sound when playing this file, so I don't really now why that happens. Will try Nisto's suggestion about the silence and brb.
EDIT: YES, IT WORKED! After I set the silence parameters to 0, everything synced up perfectly on Audacity. Can't thank Nisto enough. Thanks to kode54 too!