Extract ALL musics and sounds of a rom

[momotaro]

What program is necessary?

ZSNES can rip SPCs, but not ALL in a single pass, only one a one manually...

I use actually SNESamp and Super Jukebox as players.

P.D.: The zst and spc archives extracteds of The Lost Vikings II (U) [!] through ZSNES are sounds extrangers...

[whicker]

You're going to come across two types of games: One where everything of interest is compressed. The others where basically nothing is compressed.

The games with everything compressed are the good games, by and large.

There may be tools to find and extract things from games by a particular company, but please go to a romhacking board for that.

Most of the spc's have already been ripped. There are places where entire sets can be downloaded.

Some games "stream" audio to the sound module. This topic has been beaten to death already. For streamed audio, you're going to have to settle for a traditional audio file format like .wav or .mp3.

[MisterJones]

For ripping sound effects and music instruments, you can try Snessor. Google might help

P.D.: The zst and spc archives extracteds of The Lost Vikings II (U) [!] through ZSNES are sounds extrangers...

http://www.snesmusic.org/v2/wiki.php?iR ... Undumpable

[PHoNyMiKe]

you would need to reverse engineer the rom to see how it plays music. most games store their music in totally different formats. the code inside the rom then converts that data into an spc format that the snes's sound system can play. so you would need to re the game you want to rip, then make your own program to convert hat data into whatever format you want like wav or mp3.

or you can download the spcs, or make them one by one.

[Nightcrawler]

This topic comes up often. I will elaborate with some detail.

The SNES had extremley flexible sound hardware for it's time. That's why it sounds so much better than comparable systems from that time period. However, with flexibility comes complexity in this case.

The SNES has a dedicated sound controller co-processor, the SPC700 which controlled a S-DSP chip which actually generated the sound.

There is NO standard format for SNES music. The only thing that is standard is the fact that instrument samples and streamed audio must be adhere to a specific format. Beyond that, it's free reign!

What does this mean? Well, right from the start, it means you can create your sound system in a variety of ways. EVERY game will be required to code a CUSTOM sound program to be loaded into the SPC700. Probably every game that isn't made by the same company or share their development uses a DIFFERENT program.

What does this program do?

1. It interfaces with the main CPU using custom communications protocol. This controls when to change sound effects, background music, or other more advanced tasks.

2. It handles the actual playback of stored music files.

3. It can CREATE new instrument samples or sound effects ON THE FLY! This is generally only used for simple wave generation to mimic say the square wave sound of the NES etc, but it can be used for some other things.

The music that is played back can be stored in MIDI format, tracker format (such as MOD), or a completely custom format which is generally what is more commonly used.

It can be a variety of formats because there must be CUSTOM player code to play back the music.

These are reasons why the SPC file format is necessary. You need to capture this special custom program and emulate it because it is just about the ONLY way you're going to be able to play back the music.

Now, let's talk streaming... That breaks all the rules. In a case like this, the main SNES CPU can stream data so the SPC700. So, even if you captured the SPC700 program, you won't get the streamed information from the main CPU which can come from RAM or ROM from any location the game wants to pull it from at any time. It can be compressed beyond the standard BRR compression if the game wanted it to be. Streaming can be used for the background music(usually nto for space reasons, but a few games have) or to insert complex sound effects at any time or voice samples.

While many sound effects are played back as an 'instrument' sample, some are streamed which are near impossible to capture unless you look at the main CPU code that transfers data to the sound processor and understand where it fetches the data from, how large it is and what it is. This is NOT easily feasible by an automated program.

So, these are just some of the reasons why no program to date can rip all sounds from any old SNES ROM. That's is an extremly difficult task if possible at all.

I don't forsee anyone ever making such a tool unless it supported some sort of database or module system to be able to add something custom for each game because that is most likely what would be required.

I hope you can understand why such program don't exist by my explanation. SNES sound is a double edged sword. It's sound is more complex than any of the consoles that came before it and in certain ways more complex than sound in today's consoles as far as ease of ripping goes (That's debatable depending on game and platform).