The first two Girl's Side games' CDs have higher-quality instruments, which makes me prefer them over the DS versions. I wanted to buy the soundtrack, but I noticed that the second game's soundtrack has a lot of songs that fade out before they can loop! This ruins some songs, especially Masaki's happy theme variant, where the song gradually builds up, releasing the built-up happiness right before the loop! (Here, it fades out during the second half of that satisfying release.)
This led to me buying the PS2 game disc, so I could get whatever file that contains the music, hoping it was streamed audio.
UNFORTUNATELY, a lot of the music in the game is sequenced; I opened SOUND.PAK using FastElbJa's ADPCM Player and heard a lot of instrument samples. (Some songs are streamed but they are vocal tracks and short jingles, not any of the songs I'm interested in.)
I hope this post isn't too awkwardly written, as my mind has been getting foggier and worse this year, so I can't think of the best way to layout this post.
Basically, I still remember how I posted here before about Graffiti Kingdom's music, and Nisto really helped me, letting me hear that game's impressive-but-sequenced music again, ripped and saved from obscurity! Maybe this game could get the same treatment.
For this game, there's two roadblocks that would need to be cleared, the PAK archive format and the game's sequenced music format. All of the samples are located in SOUND.PAK, which I've uploaded here on Google Drive. Kaffu on YouTube can record some of the game's music from in-game, but I can only imagine some songs are impossible to record, with the game's ambient sounds and voice acting that could cover it up. A proper PSF2 rip would be way better than that.
Since Tokimeki Memorial 3 actually has a rip, I was hoping that the Girl's Side games used the same format and file structure, but I couldn't have been more wrong; TM3 has a weird "SOUND" folder with a "DATA" file and weirdly-named folders within it, with no SOUND.PAK file on the disc!
I'm starting to realize why neither of these games have been turned into PSF2 files; Nothing is consistent between them and TM3.
If anyone would like to make progress towards that, I'd appreciate it; Kaffu hasn't uploaded in-game recordings of either of the songs that I'm interested in (the "weekday command - spring" music and Masaki's happy variant of his theme), so I'm thinking I'll be stuck with the DS versions forever I still can't believe Konami would be so unprofessional and fade out the songs before they even loop.
edited 7:43 PM EDT July 9, 2023
There is a music player in the works though, may still take a while.
Also, that is great! I look forward to being able to play music from these two games! I wonder, is the player far enough that it could play any song from the games, or is it a really early alpha version?
I'm thinking this might end up just like with Graffiti Kingdom; I posted about my interest in the game's music, only to leave HCS64 for a long time, returning to find that a PSF2 rip (or a program that plays its music in this case) was released while I was gone.
edited 1:58 AM EDT July 12, 2023