GBS -> MP3

Palin · Post by **Palin** » Fri Oct 27, 2006 11:32 pm

Oh paragons of digital knowledge, bestow your wisdom upon me.

So I stumbled across a GBS file for the Game Boy game, "Final Fantasy: Legend II" (SaGa 2.) I had never heard of GBS before, so I looked around and got ahold of a plugin for Winamp that can play them (yah Zophars domain!)

gbs_ffl2.zip

Oh the glory! With each of the 19 tracks I was sent back to the innocent days of my youth! After sitting through them all, I wiped a glistening tear from my cheek and came to a sudden realization. These would work great as ring tones. I loaded up my WAV-out plugin and proceeded to process one of the songs. Several seconds later winamp spat out a lovely wav file. I loaded it into Winamp and it sounded perfect (complete with stereo channels) and I rejoiced. That is, I rejoiced until I looked at the file size. 46 megabytes. Now, this is somewhat ironic, being that the source GBS file was only 17kb.

I dredged my limited knowlege of audio encoding and finally it came to me. WAV files are big, I should try to encode it into MP3. So I merrily downloaded LAME and processed my WAV file. Now I was left with a 4 megabyte MP3. This is a great improvement, but still problematic because my phone only has 9mb of memory. I booted up the file in a simple editor and discovered something else, the actual song is only 34 seconds long, but the file contained several loops that added up to about 5 minutes of audio.

*SNIP* *CROP*

The file size is now down to 526kb, which is acceptable, I suppose. I can't help but think, however, that I can squeeze it down a bit more. My suspicion is that Gameboy sound outputs at a much lower quality than I'm encoding at, but I have no idea what I would do to take advantage of the situation. My goal is to maintain the exact same sound quality as the Gameboy, how should I encode the MP3 to get the best size for the quality that I need?

paulguy · Post by **paulguy** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 5:28 am

Well, for 1, only do editing on the original WAV to prevent recompressing compressed audio. Also, try using a VBR mode, 64 or 96K should do for a ring-tone.

EDIT: tell LAME to make it mono, that should shave about 20-30% off the filesize.

EDIT2: when saving the .WAV file, save it as 22050 or 320000Khz sample-rate.

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 6:44 am

paulguy wrote:320000Khz

Nice typo there.

I would also suggest using foo_gep to render the clips, or Game Music Box if you happen to be using a Mac, since the sound quality is superior to the only other offering I know of, nezplug, which is a piece of crap.

There's also Highly Advanced, the GSF plug-in for Winamp, and player for whatever you can compile it on, but that requires you to wrap your GBS files inside of a GB emulator, and it's not even a very compatible emulator at that. Or something. Don't expect this option to work perfectly.