nintendo wii and gamecube instruments? by bobbyK at 6:30 PM EDT on June 15, 2014
Hi, I was wondering if the nintendo wii and gamecube isos have a section where you can extract the instruments/soundbanks/midi sequences just like you can do with vgmtrans for DS, etc? I would love to get some instruments/sounds from couple of games, or even then create a soundfont maybe. Thanks
It would seem that a large majority of games use streamed music, rather than sequenced music, so you might have some problems with that. What games are you wanting to get the instrument/sounds from?
For a start I was looking for instruments/sounds from New Super Mario Bros Wii, because the music there does sound like it's sequenced, I don't hear anything complex for me to believe that is streamed, but then again I guess they could have originally sequenced it and then just transform it into a stream, but idk.
Most game soundtracks are composed as sequences, but there are still benefits to pre-rendering them to a streamed form for use in the game. For instance, you can compose in whatever software you want without having to worry about converting to something with a sequencer already existing for the platform (or having someone write it for you). And when it is pre-rendered, you can do normal audio mastering stuff on it to get it exactly how you want it.
I am pretty sure that NSMB Wii is mostly streamed. However, this doesn't mean that there aren't still instrument samples on the disc. If there is anything sequenced, obviously the samples for that will have to be included. It's possible that there are quite a few. That said I don't know where to find them.
Yes it's fairly easy to extract GC/Wii instruments with dolphin, for now New Super Mario Bros. Wii samples are hidden elsewhere in the brsar but I have them all here fully extracted. You can play those in vgmstream but here are the wavs as well. I don't know how to loop these. :P
Also if I remember correctly, new super mario bros. wii doesn't use sequences :( if someone can prove me wrong though by uploading a batch that would be much appreciated. XD
Not that it matters or that anyone cares, but just to clarify, hcs - even if they work with MIDIs they can still compose them using the composer's preferred tool. After that they convert the MIDI files along with the samples using (in this case) Nintendo's tools from the SDK, or develop their own formats. They're originally just .MID and .AIFF which can be created with whatever software you'd like.
So the easy route as in going with streams is simply just not having to chop up the used instruments into short snippets.
Just sharing my knowledge, is all.
@dj4uk6cjm by bobbyK at 3:20 AM EDT on June 16, 2014
@dj4uk6cjm
wow, but how did you get the wav samples? I am really interested, I need to know. I know Dolphin emu, but how you extract them to wav and does it work with a lot of games? any short tutorials on how to extract the wavs? Thanks man! :)
never mind, I got this all figured out. Dolphin helps me with filesystem extract while the .brsar is easily extracted with vgmtoolbox. The contents are sfx basically, no samples from instruments/streams :( but oh well... at least I now know how to deal with GC/Wii music rips :)
Thanks guys for the help!
and yes, it seems like it only contains streams, no sequenced music files.
You got it! It's the vgmtoolbox method :) (which is a hard method to find, took me 2 years lol) while I despise vgmtoolbox or anything to do with that software it is the only one that can extract the nsmbwii samples. The rest, if not all of the GC/WII games require szstools methods to extract their samples, hope I helped.
They're originally just .MID and .AIFF which can be created with whatever software you'd like. Not everything fits into MIDI, actually very little does. It may take a lot of setup to get the "synthesizer" set up to correctly respond to a MIDI data stream. Sound fonts are only part of the solution.
I've worked with MIDI a little and those files can store a lot of stuff. There are literally hundreds of "controllers" that are available. Even effects such as reverb, delay, tremolo etc. Now I don't know how they do it nowadays or with all systems, but I once read the sound section of the GBA SDK documentation (I am a composer and I'm really fascinated of how they did game music before just using wave data) and it literally said that the music data needs to be .MID (and could be composed with whichever software the composer wanted) and sample files .AIFF and then use the supplied tool to convert these into the required formats to run on GBA.