Gauntlet Dark Legacy Soundbank (.VBK) by RedWarrior at 2:33 AM EDT on May 21, 2018
Hi all,
I've spent the better part of a day trying to get the soundbank from Gauntlet Dark Legacy into a playable format so I could use the announcer in other games.
The game's soundbank has a different format than the game's score, VBK, which vgmstream doesn't seem to support. I saw a thread where snakemeat added support for PS2 VBK in an unofficial build, the link for which has since gone offline. Though, I'm not sure it would have helped, since for all I know they could be totally different formats with a similar extension. Thinking about it now, I suppose I could try playing a VBK from Disney's Stitch to find out.
Anyway, I've been messing around with GENH; mostly trial and error, since I don't know much of anything about audio codecs. I was able to get some intelligible audio with the following settings:
...but the audio remains heavily distorted and scratchy, and the pitch becomes progressively lower as the playback goes on seemingly no matter what settings I try. I'm in over my head, so I thought I'd ask the experts. What am I dealing with here?
edit: I should probably note that this is the Xbox version. The NGC soundbank is also VBK, though it comes with some sort of command line conversion utility that requires a dsp file I don't have, plus others.
edited 3:06 AM EDT May 21, 2018
Alternative source by RedWarrior at 7:07 AM EDT on May 21, 2018
Well, as it turns out, the PS2 version of Dark Legacy has a different file structure than its Xbox/GC ports, and it was quite painless to extract and convert them with PSound. I had previously thought that it would only extract the compressed files I've been mulling over fruitlessly for the last few hours, haha. I feel pretty silly, but also relieved now that I have what I needed. Still, I can't help but wonder about the Xbox/GC versions.
The sound files themselves use vag format if you were wondering. I've played around with them enough times to already know that. Now, what would be nice is if we could decode the arcade version's sfx since they sound higher quality.
Bumping this again rather than editing my previous post because I forgot to mention a couple things. The VAG format is supported in vgmtoolbox's advanced cutter, so it's better to use that since they'd all keep their original sample rates. Since ffmpeg/vgmstream supports vag, you can use whatever to convert them to other formats afterward. I wouldn't recommend psound for this game unless you're trying to get the original file names since it can miss some files. Even then, you can still get the names from looking through a hex editor.