Is it even possible to do anything with an .XA PSX file? by Numbers at 2:55 AM EST on February 3, 2018
I have a PS1 disc, and from my understanding, most of the music is located in the .XA files that stream the music. Although, I can't really seem to do anything with the file/files. For some reason, all the XA player programs I used refuse to scan or play the files, as I always get something along the lines of an "Incorrect Function" error, with that being the only literal context the error has.I also can't just copy the file into my computer, as I also get an MS-DOS function error. Is it even possible to do anything with an XA file?
XA files are stored in a different way then your regular files. To be precise, they use a different amount of sectors on the disc to store the payload data. To get them off the disc or work with them, you will either need an application that is aware of these differences (which usually requires some kind of direct access to the drive, hence a lot of these utilites you can find are for DOS and older windows systems) or you use your favourite disc ripping software to create an image and then use vgmtoolbox to get the XA out of there. Explorer cant do that because it doesnt know how to handle these files and all applications that dont use direct drive access end up going through explorer, ending up with the same error.
The most common reason people have problems with XA files is due to not extracting the complete sector data for the file(s). That is, only the User Data (2048 bytes per sector) has been extracted, but audio players need all the other information as well (which adds up to 2352 bytes per sector). You should be able to extract files in both ways with most software. A free one would be VGMToolbox.
Why don't you give us the name and we can download the image from online and gave a go or try making a raw cd image of the disc and try to use it with vgmtb or other xa software?
It shouldn't really, unless ffmpeg was possibly involved, there was data on the disc that allow the streams to be played back, or some funky voodoo has happened with WMP since I last used it. They don't already have riff headers do they?