Gamerips are giving me a headache by Jules at 6:57 AM EDT on July 25, 2011
Alright, so this is basically a rant followed by the question "What am I doing wrong?", because it's highly unlikely that things are actually as bad as they seem to me because people would've gotten fed up with it long ago if they were.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First of all, I'm not talking about ripping music from games that have streaming music. Thanks to vgmstream in general and test.exe specifically, I can't really think of anything to whine about here, a huge thank you to hcs at this point.
What I am talking about is ripping music from games that have either chipmusic or sampled music (GBS, 2SF, USF mostly).
Issues:
1. Everything is a plugin for winamp, foobar, etc. There are no command-line or even GUI tools that I know of that can convert a USF rip to a bunch of WAV, FLAC, whatever files. Is everyone really so low on disk space that they want to sacrifice all the advantages of conventional streaming formats (work with any player, including portable ones, easier to handle using existing tools, less CPU usage, faster seek times, etc.) for some extra disk space? As you might have guessed, I really like to have my stuff in streaming formats and if there were command-line convert tools that would really make the process of including stuff in my library a lot easier.
2. GBS specific stuff. It's hard enough to find a Gameboy emulator with decent sound synthesis (bgb is the best one I know of, and even it is not perfect), but tools to work with GBS rips? Forget it. NEZplug++ has really weird DC offset issues causing stuff to sound muddy in places, the fadeout time specification in m3u files is broken and will simply not work with anything more than 5 seconds and it does not have any bandlimiting. in_gep has bandlimiting and no DC offset issus, fadeout works fine, too, but it features lovely pops and clicks in some tracks instead.
3. 2SF specific stuff. The latest official build of vio2sf is horribly outdated. It also doesn't have any bandlimiting, but since the desmume project somehow has the source code of vio2sf in their repository, I figured why not just increase the sample rate and build the newest version to get rid of both issues. Turns out you need MSVC++ 6.0 to build the thing (WTF). I was able to build some parts of vio2sf using a newer compiler, using the latest (really old) official binaries for the stuff I couldn't build. Of course these parts don't work together all that well, it's a real mess.
I really don't know what's going on here. I can't imagine that I'm the only person that has run into these issuses so I can't help but wonder why nobody has taken some steps to resolve them yet. For the developer of a winamp plugin, it's really no big deal to ship a command-line convert tool together with the plugin. Then there are dozens of FOSS gameboy emulators out there, it can't possibly be that hard to take one of those and turn it into a working GBS player. I'm a software developer myself and would so do this if I only had enough time. And these are just the issues I've run into while ripping music from games I care about, I've never even touched PSF, GSF, etc. rips, but from what I've experienced with GBS, 2SF and USF I'm not sure I ever want to do that.
Of course, I'm thankful that there are tools like this at all, I'm just wondering why everything is such a mess and why nobody has done anything about it.
So how do you people work with this stuff? Are you annoyed just as much as I am? Or am I really trying to do things that nobody else wants to do?
Just to say at the begining that I have so little knowledge on sequenced music, that's it's not even funny! But I manage to get by. First, there is a new (unofficial) version of vio2sf winamp/foobar plugin that uses somewhat improved desmume sound emulation, that could be better (or worse) than the vio2sf you've built, try it HERE. It seems to produce pretty good sound with cosine interpolation. Next, about Game Boy emulators isn't VBA-M the best one? Maybe it's not the best one for sound though, but who knows, if you haven't tried it yet, give it a shot. And how I convert stuff to a normal format - foobar is the key here, because as long as you have decoder for the sequenced sound file, it's good. For instance, if I have a bunch of 2sf files (which I usually get out of sdat files with the help of VGMtoolbox's 'make2sf' tool), then I mark all of them, right click and choose Convert. From there I can choose wav, flac (need to point the coverter to flac.exe just once), ogg (point to oggenc2.exe), mp3 etc. I hope this was partially helpful.
Thanks, I will give that version of vio2sf a shot later, where did you get that one?
I didn't know about VBA-M, although the last time I tried VBA, the sound emulation was horrible. I'll check out VBA-M once I have some spare time though, thanks.
And yeah, I know about the foobar conversion tools / winamp disk writer, I guess I should have mentioned that in the original post. The plugin stuff is more of a nuisance than an actual problem. I get my stuff into streaming format eventually, I just think it could be a lot less painful (winamp crashes, etc.). Command-line convert tools would also have the advantage that you could put then in scripts.
The latest vio2sf is from new desmume development team, actually they took over long time ago, as soon as original developer quit the project. This plugin was compiled by GANO (from these boards), here's the thread:
I've had a look at VBA-M, it seems to be better than VBA, although that's not really saying much. It doesn't have a wave writer so I can't really compare it with what the other emulators do, but that wasn't the main issue anyways.
So it seems that other people are actually just putting up with this stuff as well, it's a shame...
VBA-M wave dump: Tools --> Record --> Sound recording
There's also VBA-RR: http://code.google.com/p/vba-rerecording/ It should be more optimized towards accuracy, but I believe it has more shortcomings with GB(C) emulation. It has a wave dump tool in the same menu, a bit more clearly labeled.
I, too am having problems with gsf and 2sf emulation. Well, fewer problems with 2sf now...
vio2sf seems to emulate the DS sound pretty accurately. I did line-in comparisons, and find it very difficult to tell the difference between the test tracks when no interpolation is used. strm files, on the other hand, do not play back as they do on DS hardware (the DS produces this 'buzz' that is cleaned out). The test tracks were the title theme (strm) and menu theme (2sf) from Metroid Prime Hunters.
gsf, on the other hand, doesn't sound a thing like the line-ins I did. I used three different systems (GBA, SP, and DS), concluded that the DS sounded the best, but compared all three anyway to viogsf - nor album recordings, for that matter. Again, the original hardware produces this 'buzz', it becomes less prevalent on the album, and almost absent when viogsf is used (even with interpolation and declicking turned off). I was using the SR-X main theme from Metroid Fusion as the test song.
Of course, it's also possible my equipment is faulty, but I can still listen directly to the original hardware.
Do you think I would have better luck with VBA-M?
I also haven't decided if using interpolation filters would be preferable. The tradeoff is accuracy of sound versus 'better' sound (I personally still hate both the GBA and DS sound systems though, and that 'buzz' problem is a big part of it).
>? > >VBA-M wave dump: >Tools --> Record --> Sound recording > >There's also VBA-RR: >http://code.google.com/p/vba-rerecording/ >It should be more optimized towards accuracy, but I believe it has more shortcomings with GB(C) emulation. It has a wave dump tool in the same menu, a bit more clearly labeled.
Oh, now I feel stupid. ;)
Anyways, I gave it a shot, and it seems like it doesn't even do bandlimiting on the square wave channels so that's a no-go already. :(
Um, I didn't realize this, but you can use negative input values for the filtering in viogsf. This begins to get output that resembles the original hardware (and CD rip comparison). I never heard this documented anywhere, but it's nice to know...