Twilight princess .aw files by kenshen at 12:23 PM EDT on April 7, 2013
So I'm new here and i recently had an idea to replace all of the music files of twilight princess with http://twilight-symphony.com/ and i have a question about aw files i know what they are my list of audio files being at http://gbatemp.net/threads/question-about-twilight-princess.336850/ how do i replace them?
The only music you can replace is the music the cutscenes use because these actually are audio streams (the .ast files). You won't be able to replace the other music since it uses MIDI-like sequences (as peronmls said).
BTW, the .aw files don't contain music, just the instrument samples.
Realistically, no. Theoretically, yes. No, you can't convert WAV files to sequences. The program mentioned on the previous page "listens" to pitches/notes, and attempts to create a MIDI file that resembles those pitches. This is most likely going to result in numerous errors (but if you're really lucky, it might work). And the more complex the source WAV file is, the more difficult it will be for the program to match the notes correctly.
Then, even if you succeed in getting a MIDI that sounds right, you need to convert that MIDI to a BMS file (I'm certainly not the one to ask, but I haven't heard of any such tool). Honestly, the amount of work necessary to acomplish all of this is unrealistic (but, as I said, theoretically possible). You'd be better of recomposing the music from scratch, as MIDI. You'd still have to convert it to BMS though, which requires that someone decode the BMS format, and then build a converter. I think there's a program that converts BMS to MIDI, so perhaps you could use the source code from that, to do the opposite (convert MIDI to BMS). That's still a stretch though.
Perhaps a better option is to replace the AW files (which contain the instrument samples) with higher quality instruments. Though, I still don't know of any tool to do that. But, if you succeed, it would result in better sounding songs in Twilight Princess. They'd be the same songs (no recomposed/altered BMS files), but the audio quality would be better. And it would most likely be easier to do this (replace the AW files) than to rebuild/replace the BMS files. It would still be a lot of work regardless.
So, back to my original answer - no it's not realistically possible. But if you have the programming knowledge, time, patience, and are able to reverse engineer formats and software, then yes, theoretically it could be done. Just as anything is theoretically possible, under the right circumstances (just unrealistic in most circumstances). Mouser X over and out.
The BMS format is reverse-engineered, for the most part.
I have another idea. If a MIDI to BMS converter will be written (I could include it in my JAudio project) you could create sequences consisting of a single note, define new instruments and add the Twilight Symphony tracks as mono streams to the .aw.
Obviously, that was a method I didn't think of. However, if you can do that (create a very long "instrument sample" and use it to create a one-instrument BMS file), couldn't you make it stereo by splitting the streamed file into two parts (one left, one right), and then just create a BMS file that plays the two "instrument samples" side-by-side? I'm reasonably certain that sequence formats can usually play more than one samples at a time. Thinking about it, I think there's a game that has actually done this, but if there is, I can't remember which game it was.
I suppose this method is possible, and certainly more realistic than your previous idea, but it's still pretty difficult (mostly due to the lack of tools, though there could be other issues that no one is yet aware of) , and requires the creation of tools that (to my limited knowledge) don't exist yet. At this point, it sounds like what you need is a BMS creator/converter, and a AW creator/converter (and a way to insert the new files into the game without breaking the game). At least, that's what it seems like to me. I'm not the man for the job, and although the subject matter is interesting, I'm not that interested in the results. Good luck. You'll likely need it (not to mention a programer - on that note, which spelling looks more correct, "programer" or "programmer"? My dictionary says they're both right). Mouser X over and out.