I actually tested this on Sony Vegas Pro and Audacity. The exact same thing happens.
Anyway to fix this?...
edited 5:09 PM EDT July 28, 2018
edited 5:11 PM EDT July 28, 2018
I need your help because it seems this Ubi Soft game stores its music in a very uncommon format (PK). There are also a bunch of SPK files in the same directory, but I don't think these contain any music at all.
I also found a "AudioInfo.bin" file. Maybe this one can be useful to understand the game format?
Anyway, here's one of the PK files here: Download PK
Thanks.
edited 11:25 AM EDT August 4, 2018
edited 5:41 PM EDT August 4, 2018
I searched for extract the music from these games, but I wasn't capable to do it.
Maybe someone knows how to do that or can give me a nice tutorial for that.
I would really apreciate it.
My only options have been to use a program called DeliPlayer (which works but has emulation issues with proper reproduction) or emulate and record it. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
SPU IRQs in MGS1 are triggered from a single one-time call to SpuSetKey. The magic of it is that the ADPCM address specified in the SpuVoiceAttr struct to SpuSetVoiceAttr is the same address defined to trigger an interrupt when the data there is read (and I must assume the data read operation happens through SpuSetKey, because if I remove the call, no interrupts occur). Furthermore, the data at the IRQ address contains a silent, looped ADPCM stream, so interrupts are triggered automatically and continuously. The most important piece of information here though, is that they set the pitch value in the SpuVoiceAttr struct to 4096 ("pt" units), which represents 44100 Hz according to the SDK docs. From what I can tell, at this rate (pitch), 256 bytes (448 samples) are read between each interrupt, which is half of the stream's size (512 bytes).
So now, the question is, how could I replicate this timing in a simple loop without the use of SPU IRQs? Any ideas? I'm simply calling the sequencer function (similar to calling SsSeqCalledTbyT in a loop), which is essentially the same that happens with SPU IRQs. Here's what I've tried so far:
* Calling SpuSetKey to trigger a non-looped silent ADPCM stream followed by polling SpuGetKeyStatus to check that it finished playing (SPU_ON_ENV_OFF)
- this actually works decently, but it's just a little too slow in PSFLab/foo_psf
- no good in viopsf (w/ spumednafen.dll), skips a lot
- Mednafen itself does play it without a hitch
* Polling root counters 0, 1 and 2
- I used SetRCnt followed by GetRCnt in RCntMdNOINTR mode, but the results seem totally random?
* VSync(-1), VSync(0), VSync...
- Obviously not enough precision with this, but I tried it...
Here's a great example of what can be achieved with agbplay.
edited 3:43 PM EDT August 7, 2018
With Smash Bros 3DS something similar also happens, the audio sounds low quality (probably to save space in cartdrige), but it is possible to mod that game to import sound files with better quality, and it works perfectly (meaning that the only reason it did not sound well was because of the audio files in the game).
However, I took a look into Majora's Mask 3D SFX files and compared them to those of Ocarina of Time 3D and.. the SFX both games share sound exactly the same, no quality downgrade or anything like that. Even Link's sounds in Majora's Mask 3D sound pretty high quality, unlike, ironically, how it sounds in the game itself.
So I came with the idea that maybe the game forces the console to output Surround audio. But, is that even possible? Maybe there's a byte in the "exefs" or even in one of the ".bcsar" files that forces the console to output Surround audio, instead of what the user has set on their console (in my case, Stereo).
Thanks in advance. Surprisingly, I have never seen anybody complain about this.. I hope we can make Majora's Mask 3D sound like Ocarina of Time 3D in terms of audio quality.
ARC files just seem to be basic archives, with files uncompressed inside them, but what I wonder about is the music stored inside audiostr.arc; It has no "magic" word at the beginning of each sound file, but it has a header part which varies in size per song, as shown here:
I tried opening the file in Audacity, opening it as RAW ADPCM with different sample rates and it always had a distinct "screeching" sound over the distorted audio, which you can hear a sample of here.
Does anyone know what I have to do to get the music out of that ARC file as normal sound files? If a method is found out, it could help me get songs from other console Sims games as they seem to have the same "data/audiostr.arc" file based on what I've read online.
Here's the file if anyone wants to try to crack the format of it and the audio within it: Download
It has to be possible to convert this music if it is even in the same format as previous games, as console Sims game pages on TCRF imply people could find unused songs, which would be hard with how unpleasant my attempts to "rip" the music have turned out...
edited 9:06 PM EDT August 12, 2018
I was searching for a program that can extract the music that seem to be stored in the Stream.h01 and Stream.h02 archives.
I read other posts and Droolie said it requires reverse engeenering because in the same directory, there are BNH and HXX files which contain references and original filenames for the music (not only, also SFX and voices) contained in Stream.h01 and Stream.h02, and maybe also in the Data.hst archive.
The codec may be IMA ADPCM. The sample rate varies, but mainly it's 22050Hz stereo.
Droolie wrote scripts for the PS3, PS2 and Gamecube versions, it certainly helps.
Here's the link to see the scripts: SCRIPTS
I uploaded the whole directory on MEGA with all the HXX, BNH files and also the Stream.h01, Stream.h02 & Data.hst but for these I used a script called "filecutter.bms" by Luigi Auriemma to reduce the file size.
DOWNLOAD
Thanks if somebody can help me on this!
edited 2:44 PM EDT August 13, 2018