Highest quality way to extract/render NDS music? by marcoxD95 at 10:53 AM EDT on May 14, 2023
Was wondering, which is the best and highest quality way to extract or render NDS music?
From what I know there is the default rom 2SF format which is basically just unchanged raw NDS music. Then there is NCSF which seems to be better or make the music render in higher quality similar to something like AGBPlay? Not entirely sure here though. Then there is VGMTrans which seems to dump everything into a midi with soundfont. However there is also something like Nitro Studio which seems to also do the midi thing but I dont know what is the difference to VGMTrans or if it sounds better.
I'd be concerned about incompatibilities with MIDI+SF2, such as discrepancies in pitchbend range, modulation depth, lowpass, ADSR and such. It's probably fine in a lot of cases but not 100%, so not foolproof, so you'd need a good ear.
AFAIK NCSF doesn't improve sound quality at all (could be wrong) but it certainly decreases CPU use very noticeably, so generally a wise idea to replace 2SF with NCSF where possible. Even that can have small inaccuracies sometimes though.
I stick to 2SF with the player set to cubic interpolation because that's enough for me. NCSF is convenient but it has some inaccuracies which 2SF doesn't have. I also am an accuracy freak so I change the interpolation method to the zero-order hold one which is aliased like the real NDS. VGMTrans just when I want to take a look to the sounds (same for Nitro Studio 2). The main advantage of NS2 to VGMTrans is that NS2 supports playback of SSARs.
edited 8:42 PM EDT May 28, 2023
use this by LandonAndEmma at 10:49 AM EDT on July 31, 2023
Use Nitro Studio 2 Deluxe and render each channel as a wav and combine them. Or use VG Music Studio.