Requesting help with figuring out XMA/XWB files by Dais! at 10:37 PM EDT on October 20, 2010
so.
I have this 750mb Stream.XWB file (there doesn't seem to be a corresponding XSB) taken from Operation Darkness. It seems to contain all the game's streamed music, sound effects and voice acting. However, actually extracting that has been a bit troublesome:
-Game Extractor doesn't seem to support XWB yet
-EkszBox-ADX 1.6 recognizes there are XMA files in there, but seems to have no clue what file size they should be and, when I attempt to extract what evidence indicates are roughly 2,200 files, it instead extracts tens of thousands of 1kb XMA files, which really isn't helpful at all.
-unxwb dumps those 2200 files as .dat files which I frankly don't know what to do with (I assume these are renamed XMAs, but I have a handful of programs I can throw them against with no luck and lots of different instructions on how to do this). It seems to have built in attempted wave conversion but it doesn't produce playable results.
-I honestly have no idea how I'm supposed to use the XMA tool in VGMToolbox r687, although I have the necessary applications for XMA extraction. I tried throwing both the XWB file and the .dat files unxwb dumped, but if I got results, they didn't manifest anywhere I looked in any form I recognized.
-Finally, towav (the extra forbidden fruit?) seems to have given me the results I wanted - generally speaking. There's still some big questions...
1. Why do I get less wave files than when I used unxwb to dump the XWB?
2. Is there a way to make towav name files based on their hex address or whatever? Along the same lines, is it possible the XWB file contains file names for the XMA files, or is that only if there's an accompanying XSB?
3. If a towav rip seems to be playing the files correctly, can it be considered as accurate as it's going to get from towav? Or are there hidden command line settings?
Specifically, consider this file extracted via towav: Mediafire Rapidshare ~120mb
That's some of the combat music in the game, and while it sounds fine, it seems to loop around 5-6 times before fading out. Is that due to the original XMA file containing all those loops?
man, I know I'm missing some other stuff here, but I'd appreciate any direction.
(and just triple checking, but there's no way to play XMA files in VGMstream and the like yet, correct?)
You decode them with towav or xmaencode. Usually you have to put a proper RIFF header on them, and you may have to use something to demux or rebuild the streams as there are many ways of packing XMA.