Metal Gear Solid 1 (PS1) - mute all sounds except BGM? by haanstaur at 7:04 AM EDT on October 4, 2026
I am looking for a way to record the soundtrack of the original PS1 game (Integral would probably do fine as well).
Writing a sequence player to replicate that of the game-engine (including an accurate reverb effect, properly parsing notes, envelopes, loops, volume mixing, summing, etc.) is hard. Nobody seems to have thought it worth the effort so far. So I thought...why not consider "the Twilight Princess method"? That is, by filling all samples which are not BGM samples with silence, and re-compile the disc with them inserted into STAGE.DIR, DEMO.DAT and VOX.DAT? This would, in theory, make it possible to just play the game and record BGM sequences as they appear throughout. I would be perfectly willing to dig through each and every audio sample (to determine whether it is an sfx or bgm sample) and then manually silence it, if that is what it takes.
This would leave me with at least one challenge: tools like Psound do not seem able to replace audio samples in the game's archives (apparently they can only extract/export them). MGS Sound Extractor claims to be able to replace sounds in DEMO.DAT and VOX.DAT, but for any .wav I ask it to insert/replace back into them, it seems to complain about the format being invalid (even though length, sample rate and bitrate are all reported as identical by both 'file', ffmpeg, and vlc). Also, MGS Sound Extractor does not parse STAGE.DIR at all, which is where the majority of sound effects are stored. Even worse, some non-music sounds seem to be synthesized/wave-generated rather than sampled.
It seems an easier angle would be to somehow mod an SFX volume slider into the game, or perhaps a "music player" sub-menu which tricks the game into playing BGM sequences as if you were actively entering a given room/stage, except it would only play the BGM. Even a hack to play the wrong music sequence in a quiet stage/room (e.g. the loading screen or in Nuke Building B1 after meeting Meryl and Mantis' music stops) would do just fine. Unfortunately, I lack the programming knowledge required to do any of that, and I would not even know where to begin.
Does anybody have any ideas for how I could achieve any of this?
And no, the (dynamically) hyper-compressed, hyper-EQ'ed official soundtrack CD just won't do. "Don't even think about using PC ports, or I'll know."
By the way, thanks so much to everyone on this forum for all the soundtrack-related work you have done over the years. Several favourite games of mine have soundtracks which would have been at least partially unavailable if it wasn't for your fine work.
edited 7:34 AM EDT October 4, 2026 [edit] (21 hours left)