Extracting FFX's Sound Effects by Rufio at 9:17 AM EDT on October 2, 2018
Hello everyone,
I'm looking for the sounds the pyreflies make in FFX as to attach them to the Particle Effects I'm making for a home made project in VR. I've spent days trying to download and search through the sound libraries others have put online one by one, but to no avail. Since I felt these libraries were lacking most of the time, missing basics like the background music or menu actions, I concluded that the best course of action is to extract them myself. Hopefully the result might come with decent file structures instead of huge folders containing thousands of non indicative numbers. After hours of research, I've read that the ff games are difficult to access to say the least. My efforts to extract the audio myself has been fruitless so far. Conventional methods do not seem to apply to this particular game. Having seen this forum's capacity to do just that, I'd like to ask for help. One of your users named Nisto has experience with this particular game. Whether he was successful I do not know. I've read all his posts and can't deduce any answers for this issue. If possible I would like his advice on how to approach this technical difficulty.
My apologies if this first post of mine has broken forum rules by asking such things, but I am at a loss here. I've dedicated many hours recreating The Cavern Of The Stolen Fayth with modern graphics for my own entertainment, but without the original sound effects from the game, it just doesn't feel right.
Hopefully you can set me on the right path, thank you for your time in advance.
That would be a bit of an issue if ffx's sfx behaved like the previous games sfx. IIRC, all the previous final fantasy games (and a couple other square games) had their sfx's synthesized on the sound chip with whatever sample it could use. That's why you generally don't see recording of games like Parasite Eve's sound effects floating around anywhere. Now, it's possible one of the non-ps2 remasters are using recordings of those sfx since synthesizing them would no longer be necessary, but I'm not too sure.
This might explain why I can't find the individual sounds without libraries I have downloaded. It might be best to try and eliminate the music and record a scene where these elements are found, only to cut it later into smaller pieces and adapt them suitable to particles. Would you have any idea how I could contact the user Nisto in person about this? Sending PM's is not available on this forum to the best of my knowledge.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of the script, but the output matches the data and structure installed onto the PS2 HDD via the installation menu available in the Japanese version. The only difference is that the so-called "modules" (ffx#) are output as folders (+ any files contained within) rather than simple binary files. That, plus some additional files/folders which do not get installed onto the PS2 HDD via the installation menu (since it's only used as a cache in FFX). Some folders are empty - creating them is intentional.
There aren't any descriptive file names to be found in the game as far as I can tell, just folders that separate certain types of data and whatnot. Also, I made up the extensions - I only use them to distinguish between compressed (.cbin) and uncompressed (.bin) data. There seems to have been a file at some point in the development stage called "cdrom.fnd" (fnd = file name descriptor/data?), which I think contained file names, but it seems to have been removed. But if there's more to it, I'd love to know. The script is in the public domain, so you're free to do whatever you wish.
Regarding the sound effects; I don't know anything about the format (SeSep), but I did figure out which SE file and sound banks are used. The Pyreflies SFX consists of at least two samples that I can tell. Both samples are from shared soundbanks (WD 0000 and WD 0001) which are commonly used in the game. The SeSep data can be found in the "ffx12" folder (files 3959, 4319, 5111, 6479 and 7037).
It seems like the sound effect utilizes some form of pitch modulation, so it might not be easy to accurately reproduce it by hand/ear (I could be wrong though). The best thing would probably be to create PSF2s of it, but that's not such a simple task either. Unfortunately, Neill Corlett didn't provide any details about the FFX driver or his custom PSF2 module, so you'd almost have to rip the driver from scratch. Alternatively, you could try to figure out the SeSep format .. if you're up for it.
The sound effect files (SeSep) are compressed, so you'll want ffgriever's de-/compressor ( http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/639/ ) if you want to mess around with them. Do note that this tool is not perfect though - there are a few files which causes it to crash. In those cases, append some zero bytes to the files, and it should work.
Finally, I thought I'd document what I know about the filesystem so far:
ffx1 contains: - files also described by ISO and UDF filesystems - a secondary SYSTEM.CNF file for HDD boot - sizetbl.bin (table specifying the original size of each file in the filesystem, sans-compression) - modulesize.bin (table specifying the size of each module (folder) in the file system)
ffx25 contains dialogues ffx27 contains more dialogues ffx38 contains BGM data ffx40 contains SeSep data ffx41 contains more SeSep data ffx43 contains more SeSep data ffx44 contains WD sound banks (both for BGM and SFX) ffx45 contains more BGM data
At least all of the above is true for SLPS-25050. I can't speak for other releases, as I haven't checked them (at least not yet).
I cannot thank you enough for all your efforts. This is the best birthday present I have had today. I will be waiting with anticipation for an update. Unfortunately time is lacking to implement your work as I have many work related projects at hand. I promise to bring the results back to you as soon as possible. Thank you very much once again!