by radornkeldam at 1:14 AM EDT on September 27, 2018
@Kirishima Sure, I understand about streaming audio, even when streaming voices many games have to stop music playback, unless they are small samples kept in RAM.
@GirianSeed Thanks for the explanation. I guess it would take hacking each file to mute the undesired sounds so that only the music is left. It's a pity. I have the music for for the opening screen's submarine scene and the scene when snake gets on the elevator sort of burned in my head xD.
Do these VAG files also contain the samples themselves or are they references to other files? Maybe zeroing out the sample data for the SFX and voices would work. How hard would you say that'd be? I ask this because I might try to do it myself if the task doesn't require advanced techniques.
I don't think you get it. The cutscene audio is one big audio stream. No amount of programming would be able to remove the unwanted audio from them.
by radornkeldam at 7:43 AM EDT on September 27, 2018
Oh... I thought he was talking about a MIDI-like sequence where the SFX and voices were played like instruments too. Sorry for the confusion
The music in the game didn't sound different in the scenes, and years ago, when using some old tools that played audio from PS1 discs, I couldn't get any of them to play, so I just assumed they were sequenced music and didn't expect them to be plain streams. I didn't know the VAG format was that.
I havent recently tried this again. Is there any VAG decoder currently. Is it now included in vgmstream? I guess I could try getting different versions of the game in different languages and try to use averaging and compares to, at least, reduce the speech... SFX would still remain there, unfortunately. There are Japanese, English, Spanish, French, German and Italian versions of the game, and I know for a fact that at least the first three have their own dubs, and the others should be the same, presumably. If they did it for Spain, they most surely did it for at least France and Germany... Italy maybe not, but probably yes.
Perhaps not worth it, though... I'll see about it.