CP:EPF .bin files. by raulix at 12:48 PM EDT on July 19, 2018
I found these files when trying to extract models from the game, when trying import the .bin files into Audacity and changing the codification to VOX ADCPM you get a loud clip with every single sample used in the game (same works with the sfx file)
The thing is that theres no way to change the .bin files to MIDI or SF2 files. and I'm 100% sure that all the music is sequenced.
If you're talking about that Club Penguin game for NDS (which I assume you are, judging by the initials), then you're probably out of luck. Sorry. :( Nobody at here, or any forum, to be honest, is going to help you. BIN files are just one of those oddball formats that don't use Nitro Composer format, but are a completely different, proprietary, custom format developed from 100% scratch. The musician for CPA probably looked at Nintendo's SDK and decided that Nitro Composer just wouldn't cut it for some reason, so they ditched it and developed their own format. Absolutely nothing technical-wise is known about that format aside from what is said above. Otherwise, there would already be info online about it. So the only way to get MIDI files from this game, or any game using this format right now is the old-fashioned, tedious, and often inaccurate way...recreating it by ear, note by note. Or you can forget about this game and extract MIDIs from games that do use SDAT or DSXE (Shin'En's music format, which is really SDAT in disguise), since there's so many out there. The only way MIDIs, or even samples could be extracted from these BIN files is if either a superhero sound reverse engineerer who really, REALLY cared about the game came along and saved the day by disassembling the sound code (they would need to be an expert in the right type of ARM ASM) or made sense of what every single hex value meant, or if the game's source code, or at least its sound code and all the tools used somehow got leaked. The first is unlikely, and the second is INCREDIBLY unlikely. The thing is, nobody knows about how the format works, and nobody really cares, really. Most HCS64 users are busy ripping prerecorded music formats for the most recent PC and PS4 games. Maybe if the BIN file type were used in a Pokemon game, they would care, but it's not. Those that DO care lack the knowledge needed to do so, such as me or presumably you. It's unfortunately like that for any game that uses sequenced music in an unknown format, ESPECIALLY on GBA. If you would like to start from research, however, I do have a few suggestions: maybe you could try looking for a pointer table in hex to find some values, such as where the samples are, where they loop, and what sample rate they use, and their ASDR. This could get you to at least figure out the sound effects format, assuming the game just uses straight-up PCM samples for SFX. You could also try corrupting part of the music file or changing several different values, and see if that makes a difference, and how these changes affected the music. One final note: the format of the samples is probably not VOX/OKI/Dialogic ADPCM, but IMA ADPCM, since most NDS games use this for samples, especially those that use the standard Nitro Composer format. So, sorry to disappoint you, but I just wanted to tell you the truth about this and why you probably won't get any more replies. It's happened a number of times before. Don't hold your breath for that superhero reverse-engineerer to come.
Some time ago, I used VGMToolbox to re-encode these .bin files into .genh files with some type of ADPCM (i forgot what it was called), then tested them with Foobar and converted to WAV so I could use Audacity to pick out clean samples
Unfortunately the SF2 would have to made from scratch and would take a while, also could not extract any MIDIS
Okay, I have done a little bit of research, It turns out the music was made in FastTracker (Bart Roijmans said that) and some of the instruments are from the Roland XV-5080 Sound Library.
I found out that the bin files are just a compressed file that contains all the soundtrack of the game. That explains why when importing the file to audacity you get all the samples. The more you know..