WarioWare Smooth Moves sequenced brsar *shoutout to ArcticJaguar725* by Kagemori at 11:56 AM EDT on March 27, 2017
Ok so it's really nagging me that I can't find a proper rip of WarioWare Smooth Moves anywhere, and decided to try to do it myself. I found very useful infomation around here but no real solution sadly.
I tried this tutorial, but as Mikurotoro said, the tool gives error no matter what. And it's even mentioned that "WarioWare: Smooth Moves is sequenced and it works" :(
I also tried unpacking the brsar, but as expected, it only exported the SFX, not the music itself.
Then I came today with these two threads (https://www.hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php?showthread=45279 and https://hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php?showthread=46639) and ArcticJaguar725 managed to export and convert the sequences succesfully from Animal Crossing City Folk, which uses the same brsar estructure as Smooth Moves.
Unfortunately, there's no explanation on how it was done other than "through Dolphin and some other sketchy methods. I also had control over the MIDI channels, which allowed me to dump the music"
As a last resort I thought about playing the game and dumping the audio directly from Dolphin, but the amount of SFX is crazy in this game to make a decent rip...
So yeah TL;DR, is there some place I can find a lossless rip or if ArcticJaguar725 is around, could you please give some insight on how you did it? Thank everyone very much in advance.
Well, I mean, all the default vgmtrans stuff is there. There's limited support for .baa files (SMG/SMG2/TP) and JaiInit.aaf files (SMS,WW) along with the associated BMS sequences.
For clarification, the "sketchy methods" I used actually involved dumping the audio though Dolphin using the exact same methods in the tutorial that you linked to. When I was dumping the ACCF data, I too had an annoying error message that was blocking my screen ("Warning:Unknown mail 00000000, write retry reboot mail.") and I couldn't figure out how to remove it, but it's still possible to dump the audio even in spite of that error. Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly how I managed to get the setup to function properly since I just set a save state as soon as I got it to play back properly, but you could probably figure it out through some trial and error.
NOTE: I was not able to launch the dvdroot through Dolphin 5.0 and get it to respond without loading the save state for some reason. It could just be a problem on my end, but idk.
Yeah that annoying error doesn't let do anything. I tried several times but to no avail, and I even tried to do it ignoring the error as you say, but navigating the different menus was very complicated and glitchy (managed to get to the player eventually, but it didn't seem to recognize the songs anyway thanks to our dear error).
Right now I'm using the program Jasper offered and while it is painstaking to have to export one at a time the 200+ songs in the brsar AND join the resulting soundfont and midi in another program to finally get a wav, seems to do it's job fine regardless.
I did notice however that some few songs are not very accurate, like in Tomorrow Hill where an instrument is also asigned the singing voice (wtf) or Tower Tennis Terror where some effects are not emulated at all.
In any case, I can see why this hasn't been done already, same with you with ACCF (congratulations for having completed such a grieving task by the way!).
So yeah, regarding the dvdroot thing I might try it but I won't be spending time in trying to make the error disappear. Thanks again for the clarification!
Yeah, a big problem with MIDI+SF2 rips is that they tend to be lossy. MIDIs to my understanding are not capable of storing as much information as the BRSAR sequences, and I have also confirmed this through my own MIDI+SF2 rips of City Folk (and really just about anything else). Granted, they're certainly nice to have, but we may need an xsf format to be introduced in order to deal with the data loss.
Question: when you tried playing things back through the dvdroot, are you sure you were trying to play back actual BGM? I noticed with ACCF that there were a bunch of (possibly dummy) files that didn't want to play back for whatever reason and it also took an incredible amount of scrolling through all of the files to actually reach the BGM.
I'll also note that it's possible to navigate the different menus around by pressing the A and B equivalents over the menus (I think) at the same time and moving the cursor around. This should make it easier to work around the stupid error message.
> I did notice however that some few songs are not very accurate, like in Tomorrow Hill where an instrument is also asigned the singing voice (wtf)
This is because MIDI only supports 16 channels and 15 instruments (since 10 is reserved for drums), and Tomorrow Hill goes over both those limits. You can use FL Studio + Fruity LSD to create multiple MIDI ports and LSDs and send them out separately.
Not sure what's going on with Tower Tennis Terror but it's possible the SSEQ files use reverb / echo, which I don't even attempt to transform into MIDI.
Oh really, are they lossy? Didn't know that. :/ Tried again the dvdroot, and yeah A+B, while annoying, makes navigating it easier.
The problem I have is that I can't find any sign of a song anywhere. Here's a screen capture of what I see and the dvdroot folder (http://imgur.com/a/zXLrZ).
Am I doing something wrong maybe?
Oh and also, how did you get the ACCF wavs from the dvdroot? Did you just record them with an external recorder (i.e. Audacity)?
> This is because MIDI...
Oh I see, thanks for the info. I'll have it in mind. Yeah with TTT that's likely the issue.
If only I could make the dvdroot thing work though...
You may be forgetting to load the actual BRSAR file. Try pressing HOME, Down, A, A while in Sound Mode to see if anything loads.
To record, I strongly recommend dumping through Dolphin, mainly because it will experience the least amount of loss/static out of any other option, especially if Dolphin manages to run below 100% performance. To enable audio dumping, within Dolphin, find Movie/Dump Audio and select it. The dumps can be found wherever things like saves for Dolphin are (in my case, the Documents folder). The file containing the audio dump (should be named dspdump.wav) will be overwritten every single time you emulate something, so make sure to move it somewhere else as soon as you close the emulation. It is sampled at just 32000Hz, but it's not a big deal since the Wii downsamples to 32000Hz anyway, so recording with another software at a higher sample rate is pointless. The only reason to ever upsample would be if you're making MP3 conversions since iTunes doesn't play back 32kHz properly for some stupid reason.
The SoundArchivePlayer should contain all of the sounds and BGM. It may take a lot of scrolling to make it to the actual BGM, so it could require some patience.
When you reach the BGM, you can press A to start playing it and - to stop playing it. The SoundArchivePlayer must be highlighted for either of these to work.
The SoundInfoViewer contains all of the MIDI channels that can be enabled/disabled at any point. Select the menu with B, press Right on the D-Pad, and you should be there. You can scroll through the channels with Up and Down, and press A to toggle them on or off.
Finally, it is possible to change the window size of the menus to make them easier to work with (although it is somewhat difficult and confusing), and it can be useful for seeing all 16 MIDI channels simultaneously. While holding B for SoundInfoViewer, first press 1 so that the menu is always open even while not highlighted. Following that, while holding B, if you press +, you should be able to change the window size by moving the cursor around.
I know this is a lot of information to wrap your head around (and also especially irritating thanks to that error), but that's part of what makes this all super tedious (in addition to the fact that you have to listen to the entire track before moving onto another). As soon as you get playback results, I highly encourage you to set a save state because it will allow you to jump immediately to backing up the next BGM track without going through all of these annoying and tedious steps over and over again.
Oh now it works. Yeah I wasn't loading the brsar :p
I already have near 100 songs exported with the SF2+MIDI method though, and I haven't tried myself yet but, is the quality improvement really worth it to re-record everything? ^^"
It ultimately depends on how much you care about quality. For a majority of things ripped to MIDI+SF2, certain sounds will sound very inconsistent from the originals or some will be missing data such as reverb or vibrato. That being said, if you are either an audiophile or plan on listening to the rips reasonably often, I would recommend doing it through Dolphin. However, if you simply don't have any time in your life, you're only curious to mess with the audio a little, or you care more about its sequenced data than you do about having streamed rips, then I'd recommend sticking with the MIDIs since it does take awhile to dump, plus it requires a fairly strong understanding of exactly where every track loops and how to seamlessly loop audio to the nearest exact sample in the first place (nearest 31.25 µs (microseconds) in this case).
Remark: If you do record through Dolphin, I would also recommend keeping a backup of all of the recorded WAV files because even the best of us will occasionally make a mistake while looping and may need to redo it. Or much worse yet, you could realize, say, you forgot to amplify all of the audio data and have to completely start over from the beginning. Having WAV backups would save you from many, many hours of re-recording everything. (BRSTMs encoded in ADPCM are NOT lossless files, meaning you cannot just convert those files back to WAVs. Ways are being introduced to create them using PCM16 though BrawlBox, but the current implementation as of right now is buggy and may require another update before it can be used safely, as the developer is aware of the issue. Besides, if you plan on using said BRSTMs to replace the audio in a game like Super Smash Brothers Brawl, you will need to use the ADPCM encoding anyway (I think) since all of the other files in the partition use ADPCM.)
Whoops, I think I might have been going for too long at this point. I'm not very good at hiding my obsessions with audio. I apologize if my rant was somewhat intimidating. :(
Oh no please I really appreciate your help and suggestions. I don't know haha I just want to have a good soundtrack of Smooth Moves to replace the VBR MP3 rip I always end up finding.
I don't really know how to loop like you say so that's a problem... Lol unfortunately the MIDI method doesn't loop the songs either so it's pretty much the same now that I think about it.
Now this thing stops when I play back one song, it stays at 0 fps and I have to restart. Soooo nope. I would actually do it if it was more convenient but no way, I'd rather wait for another way to unpack brsar sequences, if any at all. I'll just record a couple more of the MIDIs and that's it. :/
By the way, I was referring to this rip (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7443260FEE96175F). I still don't understand how in the world it was done.
I'm not gonna lie; the quality of those videos is better than I would've expected considering the music is all sequenced and there's been no formal rip of the game (that we know about anyway). However, it is still possible that this was recorded via Line-In or through Dolphin with the use of Gecko Codes or something.
Regarding the 0 FPS issues you've run into, unfortunately I have no idea why that would be happening since I never actually ran into that problem. If I had to guess, it is probably related to certain settings that may or may not be enabled within Dolphin.
True... I already tried to find a way of muting the SFX before looking directly into the brsar, but I couldn't find anything as far as I know... So it's surprising how some of the songs in that rip should have SFX and they don't. Don't know why that happens either, it actually worked the first times, but suddenly stops. Nevermind though!
@Guinarda
Sure thing, here's the brsar: https://mega.nz/#!lAlTBA4a!hjQhhWtQ2ZOTNv4KK7sGTuZJ9iGPBKn_GtpMiKjnWE0
As a short recap:
- Opening it with a brsar unpacker will just dump meaningless streamed sound effects while all the sequenced music remains inside.
- It can also be opened with the dvdroot for Dolphin offered in that tutorial. Best quality but a total pain to record because of an error in the program.
- Lastly, every audio file can be viewed and exported into a midi and a soundfont file with VGMTrans, which was kindly suggested by Jasper. Less painful, but joining again the MIDI and the SF files externally in another program will result in some inaccuracies and the quality is not the best since the base is a MIDI. Sadly, VGMTrans isn't capable of exporting a wav directly.
The brsar is actually very convenient because it includes all regional variants and even long forgotten E3 demo exclusive themes for all versions and is not particularly big. That doubles the frustration that it cannot be properly ripped though! Ugh
I may be beating a dead horse at this point, but I've discovered it is possible to at least hide most of that error. To do this, open viewer.elf with Notepad++ and use Ctrl+F to find "Unknown mail %08X, Write retry reboot mail." and select all of the text (but not the NUL). Replace that with " ", and a majority of that message will disappear. (Note: you must use the exact number of spaces provided or the program will crash.)
EDIT: Whoa, the spaces in the post do not carry over. Try replacing it with 43 spaces.
DUDE THAT'S BRILLIANT! It works perfectly now! The problem before was that the error made navigation nearly impossible to me, I couldn't read properly what I was selecting and holding A+B messed with other inputs, but now everything is clear and fully operational!
The freezing problem also seems to have been temporary, I didn't get it this time in a couple of attempts, so I'm totally recording a bunch of songs now.
Thank you so much and Jasper too for all the help, really, if it hadn't been for this, I'd have still been completely clueless.
Oh and as a side note, kinda off-topic, I was checking out your Animal Crossing City Folk rip compared to a mp3 one I had. Yours is clearly superior in quality, thank you very much again for doing it! But I noticed some things:
- Four relatively relevant songs are missing: the bell tune that plays at the city when the hour changes, the Bunny Day song, the default town tune and the Wii menu channel jingle. Some furniture tunes are also missing like the Music Box, the Pinball Machine, the Triforce or the Starwing.
- The Museum has a different variation for the bug section. It's nearly identical to the aquarium but if you listen closely the aquarium has reverb in the notes of the main beats while the bug variation has none.
- Some songs also end before they loop. Minor issue (at least to me), but just so you know.
Now it's me who's maybe beating a dead horse, but I thought I could tell you just in case you were still interested in it. It's also a little something in return for all your help with this. ^^
Glad I could help with the error; it's a shame I didn't know about it at the time of making the ACCF rips. :(
In response to your ACCF notes:
The bell tune is generated around your town tune, and the default town tune doesn't appear to have its own sequenced jingle within the BRSAR that I'm aware of (especially since one of those notes is complete RNG upon every playback anyway). The sounds like the firebar and the starman honestly probably shouldn't even be included within the rips because they're technically just sound effects (but I wanted them there anyway just because); it would've been more efficient for me to just rip those straight from the BRSAR, but I was too lazy. I don't have this confirmed, but the same probably goes for Bunny Day. As for the Wii Menu banner sound, honestly that should really be included. I didn't see it originally but then kinda forgot about it later.
Regarding the museum, I'm honestly pretty sure the bug room actually does have the echoed sounds in there; the echoes are just incredibly hard to hear. With the bug room making the music quieter and the bug noises being absurdly loud, it can be very difficult to tell that it's even there at all. I'll look into this more closely later in case I'm mistaken. (EDIT 1: Yup, echo is definitely there. So at least I didn't mess that up...)
Could you note all of the tunes you found that end before the loop? I know most variations of the museum sound like they could've been looped a lot earlier, but I left them longer on purpose since that's how the midi is structured at least (plus I'm pretty sure there are some very subtle velocity changes throughout, but maybe it's just me).
EDIT 2: Since I don't feel like putting up a new link altogether until I find the time to redo the ACCF loops using PCM16, I'll just throw the banner sound here. BNS files can be played using vgmstream.
Well granted, some furniture are just sound effects, but others have actual songs like the Music Box (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SUjs9rh_0Y), Pinball Machine or the Arwing (couldn't find these in YT).
In that case, maybe Bunny Day is an exception because it plays on top of the hourly songs (I don't know if this applies to other holidays like Festivale or Toy Day) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t__o1fWdHtc). Anyways, as you can see, it's a pretty nice tune that would be a great addition for the sake of completion.
Regarding the Museum, I think the current songs are wrongly tagged. Ideally I would actually play City Folk and go to the Museum to compare, but I'm far from home. Judging by Wild World however, which City Folk is a carbon copy of in terms of music, you can clearly differentiate between Bug and Fish:
It's only logical that in City Folk they were given the same treatment. Why wouldn't they? Every Museum room has its own variation, and I would find it very odd that they reused the same for Bug and Fish specially when WW has separate themes. Because they are very similar, I guess a lot of people didn't notice the difference and just named one of them as both.
List all the songs without loop? Yikes, well, listening here and there I spotted a couple of them, but I'll have to go through it in depth.
Thanks for the banner jingle!
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Also, just so it's not a completely unrelated post, I made a comparison between MIDI+SF2 and direct dumping via Dolphin.
So I just decided to rip the notable ACCF sound effects straight from the BRSAR and now have access to those files. I now have the sounds like the Music Box, the Arwing, and Bunny Day. (However, I didn't dump the Pinball Machine because I'm pretty sure it's just a short sound effect.)
So I went to play Wild World to compare the museum sequences and came with an interesting conclusion. It turns out that Wild World's bug room actually DOES have the echoes you speak of, so there must be a mistake in the source (BTW the links you have provided are invalid links). A rule of thumb: always trust the games before somebody else's rips.
So to be completely honest, I don't exactly know what you mean when you say "Some songs also end before they loop." The reason I wanted the examples was mainly to grasp a better idea of what you meant by that because I don't recall looping songs that just end and stop before looping, unless they're songs that aren't meant to loop like the K.K. Slider stuff.
OKAY, back on topic. So I am currently aware that the MIDI+SF2 rips do support a higher sample rate than does the Dolphin rips. This is perhaps the main reason I say a Wii xsf format for these games would be perhaps the only way to improve the quality over Dolphin rips. See, even though MIDI+SF2 may be higher quality by sample rate, it's usually pretty inconsistent compared to what is heard while actually playing the games, which I find to be way more important most of the time. Ultimately it depends on whether or not the quality of the rip available is trash and the levels of inconsistency found in the MIDI+SF2 rips. (At least for ACCF, there is a pretty massive difference between the Dolphin rips and MIDI+SF2.)
That's great! Would it be possible for you to share those extra tunes please? :D
Oh absolutely, I've seen way worse mistakes naming songs. It still hurts when I see StickerbRush Symphony, it's STICKERBUSH for crying out loud! Oh it appears that that site removes uploaded stuff in 24h if you don't have an account, oops. Well those were the fish and bug variations, but you have already played the game so nvm.
When I had your rip and the old mp3 one, I noticed some songs in the mp3 one were way longer. But nevermind, I've already deleted the mp3 one and can't spot them again.
Dolphin is on the right, forgot to mention. To be honest, the MIDI rip can have higher rates but it sounds nowhere as good as the Dolphin dump, so yeah. I don't know if there's anything left to say regarding Smooth Moves at this point haha
The archive is made up of RWAVs, which are dumped straight from the BRSAR. The two exceptions are the banner sound (.bns) and the Music Box, which I had to record and loop manually. I just decided to upload the ADPCM version of the Music Box for sake of uniformity, but I do have the lossless one finished already.
I will take this down once I finish converting all of the ACCF stuff to PCM16, which I will likely upload here somewhere else. At that point, an improvement of quality cannot happen without the introduction of xsf since it's a completely lossless dump at that point.
(This is probably not the best place to state this since I'm referencing a different thread, but the weird distortions I originally noticed with the WAVs are more than likely issues with the source sounds themselves than the actual Dolphin rips, meaning they would probably be there with xsf too. All I had to do to reach that conclusion was play Wild World for a few minutes. There were similar sounding distortions that were 10x as noticeable. Granted, it's a different game and the DS's sound is garbage, but I still feel like it holds significance for City Folk.)
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Hmmm, we're getting way off topic to the point where we should probably be in a different thread altogether (but I don't feel like starting a new one though). I feel obligated to say something relevant so that we're not 100% unfocused from the main point of the thread, so I guess I will...
SO...how are the Smooth Moves rips coming along? Do you plan on dumping everything from the game or just some things that matter more to you? Have you run into any major/minor difficulties recently? Will you need help looping the final products? (FWIW I could probably help with the looping since you have less experience, but I'm not overly familiar with the game so I'm worried I may accidentally loop something in the wrong place. I'm quite familiar with Animal Crossing, yet I nearly fell into the same trap (or...it's possible I actually did unknowingly). Some of the older MP3 loops definitely had looping issues.)
EDIT 1: Yup, just did a direct comparison with the MIDI+SF2. The distortions I was talking about are just as present in those as they are with the Dolphin rips. In all honesty, that's probably a bad thing because that means an xsf rip would certainly contain those too.
EDIT 2: Shoot, forgot to respond to the MP3 looping thing. I mean, it would make sense that the MP3s are longer because they aren't indefinite. Looping BRSTMs are, so a larger file size is nothing more than a waste of space at that point. Admittedly I do tend to loop things later than what could be seen as optimal more or less as a safety net in case there's a slight difference that could be easily overlooked before my set loop. Even more importantly, it's not good practice to loop the audio exactly at the repeating point (*cough* *cough* NIANTIC *cough*) because that's a fantastic recipe for a terrible loop. The worst part about doing this is that instruments tend to carry over into the repeating point, so looping right on it would cut them off and sound terrible. Pretty much the only exception to looping like this is if there is complete silence directly before both the starting and ending loop points.
I have no idea what you mean by converting to PCM16 haha Is there any improvement than just converting the rwav to wav? Thanks for sharing! I'll try to open them with, uh, vgmstream perhaps?
Well there's 4000+ sound files within the brsar, from which 98% are just meaningless sound effects, so yeah, if anyone wants to tackle the whole thing, be my guest, but not me! Nah I'm just trying to do a selection of the songs I remember and like the most.
Now that you mention it, I recently found the first song that loops, and it was the E3 title screen theme (let's try this site instead then: http://vocaroo.com/i/s0YpBdK9UHiN, oh and it sounds much better on the PC btw, it seems it had to be downgraded in quality to be uploaded).
Oddly enough it had a silence gap in the moment of the loop (1:13), and I started to fear that all looping songs would have the same issue. Luckily I checked the final title theme and it loops fine, the other was from E3 after all...
I searched online on how to loop with Audacity and it recommended to use the "Find Zero Crossings" option for seamless looping. As you say, the only way for that to work best is if there is silence in between. I got lucky though, and while it may not be perfect, at least it turned out not noticeable I think. ^^''
Thanks! I'll have it in mind! Luckily so far it's the only song that had problems looping by itself. In any case, I uploaded it now to see if you find the loop good too. :)
Oh and I have found the reason of the freezing problem, it happened every time I used a save state. Now I have to start the viewer and load the brsar each time, but thankfully without (most part of) the error it's no big deal.
Oh sorry, I should probably explain PCM16. So basically I am trying to create new BRSTMs that use a different encoding style (PCM16) than the first ones did (ADPCM). The reason for this is because PCM16 is lossless and does not degrade the quality of the audio whatsoever. However, the ADPCM encoding does, and although the loss is insignificant in most cases, it is somewhat noticeable for Animal Crossing. The typical standard for encoding BRSTMs is with ADPCM mainly because that's what most Nintendo games use and the file sizes are 3-4x smaller, but there are some instances where PCM16 will be seen (for example, Mario Kart Wii actually uses both). vgmstream should play these back no problem, so there's nothing to worry about there.
Dang, the quality of the audio you've provided is absolutely horrible. I'll assume the site is to blame, but when you're dumping, make sure you back up everything in its original WAV format. If for any reason you must convert to mp3, please at least set the bitrate to 320 kbps with Stereo and Constant Bit Rate if you can.
Anyway, my ears aren't able to pick up anything that stands out in the loop, but to be fair the quality of the mp3 is already terrible and it's just hard to pick up on in general, so that could be why. Could you try something like MediaFire to share it? I'm pretty sure it's free for up to 50 GB iirc.
What I did decide to do is write a rough tutorial in a Microsoft Word document over how I tend to create loops. I'll share it with you because it'll probably help you for these kinds of purposes.
EDIT: For the RWAVs, you can just leave those files alone because vgmstream already supports them. Relooping those would only be useful for injecting into another game like Super Smash Brothers (or if seeing the .rwav extension just grinds your gears).
Oh I see. Wow thanks for the guide! Very interesting method! The result is truly impeccable.
Yeah the quality is not that good, I wonder why that site does that? First time I used it actually, so good to know now. Anyways, here's a Mega link for the file itself: https://mega.nz/#!pYsmGb5K!CzGhh9ASge3NGkrd7iMlMxh_xHnS33omCxdJqs7njn0
All of them are still in wav form, I'll most likely turn them into flac when I'm done recording. Truth is I'm kinda busy these days and haven't continued tbh.
Aaand not much else to add this time around I think.
To be honest, I do find that your loop does not stand out and that it would probably go undetected. However, I would still recommend trying the method I have provided for the sake of perfection. Through close investigation of the audio, I can tell exactly where you looped it, and it is (unsurprisingly) just a little off of the beat, which is capable of ruining the feel of the tune if it's a significant amount off. The tutorial should either get you perfectly on beat or so unbelievably close that it's almost negligible. It really depends on the consistency of the dumped audio since some of the instrument samples don't perfectly line up for some reason. (I think ordinary MIDIs run into this problem sometimes too iirc.)
On that note, I have some disgusting finals next week, so I may not be all that available for awhile. If you have a question, you can post it, but I can't say when/if I'll respond.
EDIT: Actually, are you even converting these to BRSTMs at all? If you aren't, then you don't even need to worry about looping at all; just keep playing it back through Dolphin until you think it's long enough and then fade it out for 10 seconds or so at the end. There is legitimately no reason to loop it manually unless you're creating looping files.
No actually I just want to have them in flac or something lossless.
Yeah I know, I leave other looping songs play in Dolphin and stop recording after they loop enough, but in that very song the loop isn't properly encoded or something and it makes a fade out gap between the first and second loop as default.
Good luck with your finals! I have mine later haha
is it normal that WarioWare Smooth Moves BRSAR takes a looooooooooong time to open? VGMToolBox refuses to open it, but VGMTrans takes an eternity to open :/