Can PSX XAs be made to loop? by Tallgeese at 1:50 PM EST on February 28, 2010
I have a very strange question...

Someone is asking me if it's possible to extract PSX games' XA music in such a way that it'll loop as in the actual games. For example, Symphony of the Night's background music.

Not knowing the answer, I ripped the XA using CDMage and VGMToolBox, but it doesn't loop with in_vgmstream.

Am I doing it wrong, or is it simply impossible to make it loop to begin with?
by Tallgeese at 2:02 PM EST on February 28, 2010
...Never mind, I am an idiot.

SOTN seems to play the first dramatic part of Tragic Prince, then go to a second XA with just the parts that loop forever. How very sneaky.

I don't suppose it's possible to merge these two files and make the result loop at the appropriate time?
by manakoAT at 3:29 PM EST on February 28, 2010
No, the question "Can PSX XAs be made to loop" isn't that stupid.
Sure, XA CAN be looped, and i think some rips should loop (like Soul Calibur), it's just that someone has to implement this stuff somehwere into vgmstream (it will be GENH for sure)
by Tallgeese at 3:37 PM EST on February 28, 2010
Thank you for your response, I feel less silly for asking now.

One thing I am curious about... is the looping when actually in the game part of the XA file itself (like WAV loop points that sadly don't work in Winamp), or is it the code in the games that does it?
by hcs at 3:45 PM EST on February 28, 2010
I'm fairly certain it's the game doing it. I don't think XA has any mechanism for looping in the format.
by Tallgeese at 3:52 PM EST on February 28, 2010
Thanks.

I don't suppose you know of a format where I could basically splice two XAs together and set it to loop starting at some arbitrary point?

I tried WAV, but Winamp doesn't seem to recognize the loop points I set in Wavosaur.
by bxaimc at 3:56 PM EST on February 28, 2010
manakoAT, Soul Calibur is DC, not PSX :P
by manakoAT at 4:10 PM EST on February 28, 2010
Whoops, i meant Soul Blade/Edge!

Tallgeese: vgmstream supports some loop types for wav files, try to rename your wav to *.lwav

edited 4:11 PM EST February 28, 2010
by Tallgeese at 4:29 PM EST on February 28, 2010
Manako: Thank you! That works wonderfully.

Could you tell me how to just splice two XAs together, if that is possible?
by manakoAT at 5:20 AM EST on March 2, 2010
It is possible, but it's a bit tricky... If you have 2 files per song for SotN, you have a bad rip... just re-rip it with vgmtoolbox, it will append all blocks to one file
by JudgeIto at 11:47 AM EST on March 2, 2010
No, it's not a bad rip. Many tracks in SotN have one XA track with the song's introduction and one playthrough of the main song, and a separate XA track for the second playthrough to avoid replaying the intro. See "Dracula Castle" for example.
by manakoAT at 12:49 PM EST on March 2, 2010
That's true, but it's just a quick and dirty solution by Konami (SotN is tthe only game where we found this)...
If you take a look at both "pieces" you'll notice that the Block-ID byte is in both files the same, in case of XA it means it is ONE track, not two or three or whatever.

BTW: There's still no loop info, even with 2 pieces of a song

edited 12:53 PM EST March 2, 2010


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