The video demultiplexer in VGMToolbox should work to extract substream SS2 audio, I believe. May just need to rename the output files if it doesn't do it already.
Thanks again! Forward to a full music rip. There are like 10 music tracks in the game, two per track, depending on teams and/or difficulty. I did a search on SDJ.BIN. This file contains all audio related data. We had found MOD/MIDI data at the start of this file. At 0x1E9800, I find [53 53 68 64]=='SShd'; after 32 bytes, [53 53 62 64]=='SSbd'. So, these are SS2 headers! I cannot extract using Video Demultiplexer, 'PSS (PlayStation Stream)' format. Got this error: Error processing <P:\hresvlgr\SDJ.BIN>. Error received: Input string was not in a correct format. Maybe [.NET]-related. I'm ignorant on that. So, manual hex extracting seemed the alternative. I found 55 files with that header. First 12 of those are THE music. Remaining 43 are voice sound.
My questions: * Is SS2 an uncompressed/lossless music format? They're almost 4x the size of an equivalent XA psx audio file; the SS2 seems like DVD-audio type format. * Is it possible to rip this as GENH format files? As in, the first file I tested, is not looped, maybe ALL tracks are. * What parameters do I use if I want to convert a SS2 file to GENH for a loopable/compliant music rip? How do I get those parameters? * If possible... can somebody just upload the GENH rip for this game? (too much asking??) Again, thanks for more enlightment.
(Corrected "after 16 bytes", should read "after 32 bytes")
Help anyone? How do I make the GENH headers at least?
Two more questions: How do I get the loop points? Because offset 0x18 are all [FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF]s Is it really hard (as in "not for noobs") to find those loop points?
Try VGMToolbox's Advanced Cutter tool. It has some SS2 or ADS presets. These are different file extensions for the same format. I just can't remember which is used for the presets.
Thank you very much. For replying, of course, and for the hints.
I now followed through your suggestion, using Advanced Cutter > PS2- SShd type 3 (type 2 did not get me all music, type 1 playback is garbled-clikory); preset extension is .ads, no problem in changing default ext.
Files were not very different to ones obtained with manual hex-cut-paste. Wasn't too hard to manually hex-cut-paste, but only for first 12 tracks. Only 1st & 7th files has difference of 1kB of zeros less when compared with manual cut, not important in playback it seems; 11th file has 22 kB-zeros less. 12 music files, 43 voice files, for a total of 55 stream tracks, as expected.
Inspecting & researching with what little/significant info I could gather from this very website, I could make some info from the header, as follows: //LEGEND // // (wordsize is 32 bit == 4 bytes) // "[word]" //'text' //0xhex_value // value==some equivalence I could recognize ------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ 'SShd' ] [0x18] [0x1 =#of embed tracks ¿?] [0xbb80 == 48000 hz] [0x2 ==2 channels] [0x200 == (d)512 (interleave)] [FF FF FF FF] [FF FF FF FF] [ 'SSbd' ] [size == 4*#samples] [0x32F=(d)815 ¿?] [=0xAF=(d)175 ¿?] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Those are first 40 (header I think¿?) + 8 = 48 bytes of info. I do not know what info represents offsets: 0x18, 0x1C, 0x28, 0x2C.
The 40-bytes header is followed by ~10kB of zeros more or less. [ 0x0 ] [ 0x0 ] [ 0x0 ] [ 0x0 ] ...
Somehow "Advanced Cutter/Offset Finder" was not an intuitive enough name for me, that it seemed that I did not pay enough mind for its almost-intimidating interface; that is, until I learned enough of offsets, samples, interleave, and such.
Now, if anybody would be so kind of answering me, how can I find the loop points/ offsets without recurring to WAV conversion? I'm trying to make GENH files for this set.
-------------------- punylon -------------------- any possibility you upload your rip to the PSF2 database/rip collection (josh/zophar/etc)? It's not found in any PSF2 set.
So... where can I find "unapproved" rips if they're not here? I suposse nowhere, isn't it?
At least, could you please upload the rip, or at the very least, just the GENH headers? Or the GENH loop points? AFAIK they're just 4kB of data (per file) preappended to the .ads/.ss2 files I just got.
I could not get enough info on this file format, so I cannot do the looping myself, and that's why I ask for your help.
I know, the thread seems to have derailed from the original intention, as I initially thought the music all was PSF2-able, until I found the extra data / no-music tracks for the races in the BD/SQ. So forgive me if this thread does not get enough attention.