Ripping music samples/instruments

[Kaijyuu]

From my very limited knowledge of the playstation, I believe that songs are more or less MIDIs. I would like to rip some of the instruments/samples used by FFT and turn them into short .WAV files.

Anyone have any knowledge on the subject?

[Xifanie]

what for? If it's just to listen to the music you can grab the PSF archive in the downloads sections and use winamp + Highly Experimental plugin or another psf player. If you want to transfer .wav to your ipod or something you can convert from winamp using the waveout output plugin which comes with winamp AFAIK.

[Kaijyuu]

I uh, actually want to port songs accurately to another game (a SNES one in fact). That will require me having the individual instruments and rewriting the song into a new format.

I could of course get samples using the same instruments, but in all likelyhood I'll never be able to match FFT's songs without FFT's samples.

[Sephirot24]

If you ever get some progress with importing music INTO FFT or any info related on how music in FFT works, please let us know.
We've known it was something like MIDI which is a sequenced format, instead of a streamed one like WAV or MP3.

Also, if you need WAVs, you can DL them in MP3 form and then convert them with Goldwave or any other program.

[Kaijyuu]

Progress! I thought I found a miracle program that would do this for me, but it doesn't seem to be able to rip FFT sounds.

It works with vagrant story, valkyrie profile, and marvel vs capcom, but not FFT. I did not test any other games.

http://www.zophar.net/utilities/psxutil/psound-soundreaver2.html

I'm going to dump my FFT cd into various formats and hope that it can recognize the sounds from one of them.



EDIT: Success!

PSound couldn't detect the sounds by scanning the whole game, so I extracted WAVESET.WD from the sound folder. PSound was able to read the sound directly from that.

Excellent...


EDITEDIT: The instrument data used in a single FFT song is about ~4x as big (in terms of filesize) than the SNES can handle. Not wholly unexpected, but damn...


@Sephiroth: I haven't a clue on how the songs themselves work, but I can tell you the various similar files in the sound folder are probably songs. You'll need to figure out the format they use.

A "convert mp3 to FFT song" almost certainly impossible. To make a new song in FFT, you'll likely have to write one... in a hex editor.

[Cheetah]

Excellent work Kaijyuu, this is a very good discovery.

[Sephirot24]

Nice research Kai!!

My expectations were pretty much:
BEST SCENARIO: I can do a MIDI and then convert that to whatever format FFT songs are and exchange / import.
DECENT SCENARIO: I have to hex edit it with some probably non-existent program that'd be similar to famitracker or something like that... but oh well, if that was the case, even if IDK anything about programming I could try it out and learn.
WORST SCENARIO: the program doesn't exist.. so there's no way of doing it unless someone makes it, but no one here knows how sound formats and stuff work apparently :/