N64 sample ripping. seriously!

[Blitz Lunar]

http://hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php?showthread=22556

coda basically just won the entire internet; a hacked version of 64th note that dumps wave files.

okay, here's the deal; what this doesn't do is rip the discrete instrumental samples, but rather it isolates sound channels (sort of) and dumps them to wave on the fly/as you play. the downside is that means you have to manually extrapolate samples, and envelopes/looppoints won't be preserved. the plus side is that this seems to work fairly universally, which cannot be at all claimed for other rippers that are successful with maybe 5-10% of games ( SRip/N64 Sound Bank Ripper, N64 Sound Lib Extractor and N64 Sound List Tool.) so all those problem games you really wanted sounds from but couldn't get using the other tools, you may be in luck. :J

anyway... it's easy to use. just install the plugin in xmplay/winamp, turn on audio HLE, play a USF of your choice + let it play for the duration (maybe one loop is enough) then check out the wave files produced in the C:\usfdump. check his hcs64 thread for anything i haven't mentioned. then have fun cropping out samples. it's not a perfect solution, but it's a whole lot more practical than what's available in most cases.

[mudlord]

Thanks.

Now I am interested in improving on that. We could strip the USF player down so much that only audio HLE and the R4300i core remains, as well as the main playback thread. Everything else: gone

[Blitz Lunar]

you should now get the version mudlord posted at hcs64. standalone/commandline and doesn't work in real-time (makes it much quicker), plus probably other benefits. i'm told that it can be improved further still though. it's already awesome :J

[Mocgames998]

I can't seem to get it to work, Even in Winamp. The song plays, but no sample output.

[Blitz Lunar]

try mudlord's thing instead if you haven't yet. also make sure you don't still have the original 64th note installed (it's possibly winning in a fight over a shared file extension) and make sure you have a c:\usfdump directory. other than that i dunno what to suggest.

i was collecting mystical ninja 64 sounds yesterday and i stumbled across a problem, which i've now resolved -- if you extrapolate the sounds from the dumps and keep them at 44.1KHz they will be aliased to hell, and will sound like ass if you try to use them at anything but their original pitch. simply resample them to 32KHz (or in some cases 22KHz when 32KHz doesn't work out for whatever reason) and it helps enormously. the loss of high-end is minimal but they will be infinitely more useful. you can keep 44.1KHz for percussion/anything that doesn't need to be used at a different pitch, if you want to preserve just that tiny little bit extra sparkle.

this is pretty important if you plan on collecting and using samples at all.

[Jace]

I can't tell how much I should bow down.

[Blitz Lunar]

finally recorded this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFCjjgGvcpg

made a soundfont too which is up on my site

[mudlord]

http://mudlord.emuxhaven.net/crap/usfsampledumper.rar

[fluidvolt]

Okay, first off: Awesome. I've only gotten mudlord's command line version to work, but still. I have a question though:

Are any of the exported .wav files supposed to sound anything like the original song besides instrumentation? It's not just the fact that instruments seem to switch all the time per .wav, but drumbeats seem spaced closer and the whole track seems to be over much quicker than the actual song. For example I put a 1:30 track through it (doesn't loop), and the longest single .wav was under 20 seconds. Is this normal? Is it possible some of it is not being processed or something?

I mean, the resulting instruments in the .wav seem alright but I just don't want to go through all the trouble of ripping/extracting and then find out I screwed something up. Thanks in advance, and again, good job with this coda and mudlord.

[Blitz Lunar]

Yeah it's strange. It works flawlessly with Mystical Ninja, but try it with Bomberman 64... everything is super-fast, sporadic and all over the place. It's hard to know what's what. You can find the individual sound objects with enough persistence but it's not as easy, and likewise, I feel sort of hesitant to sample anything that's playing at light-speed, in case it sounds like ass in lower registers. My impression is that it's to do with sample rates, and also like you say, dynamic voice allocation. I dunno if that is the whole story though. I'm the least qualified to comment on this, probably.

[fluidvolt]

That was my worry as well, sampling only to find out it sounds horrible in normal pitch ranges.

I guess in the end it still depends on which game you happen to run through it. Paper Mario doesn't output anything, Animal Forest sounds lightning fast and so does Glover 64. What I did notice though, is that on Glover 64 (but not Animal Forest) when I lowered the sample rate to 22khz in Audacity the .wavs sound perfectly fine, tempo-wise and pitch-wise, at least from a glance. I don't know what that means. Is there a way to lower the sample rate without altering tempo/pitch though? In Glover's case it works out fine but perhaps not in other games.

[Blitz Lunar]

Is there a way to lower the sample rate without altering tempo/pitch though?

depends on software but yeah. Goldwave gives two options: "Playback rate" and "Resample". The former changes the pitch and sample rate, the latter changes the sample rate only. I'm surprised if Audacity doesn't have resample.

[fluidvolt]

Thanks Blitz Lunar, I think I found the equivalent command in Audacity. Hopefully I can rip some decent N64 sounds now.

I think I'm going to go ahead and try to rip the super-fast sounds just to hear what they sound like as instruments. Who knows, they might not sound half bad.

[fluidvolt]

Alright, so I think I made some kind of discovery pertaining to the troublesome N64 games; This might not be news, but apparently different games' usfs play back at different sample rates. Taking a quick look at Winamp's sample rate indicator shows Mystical Ninja plays at 44Khz, Animal Forest at 32Khz, and Glover at 22Khz, etc. However, all .wavs that come out of the program are at 44Khz, despite the game fed into it.

First listen to this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16288082/Animal_Forest-6PM.mp3 -- It's 6 P.M. from Animal Forest played by samples that I extracted out of the game yesterday. I do not take credit for the transcription, I used a MIDI from here by Andrew Shand; If that's against the rules I apologize and will take it down, but I needed to test the sounds quickly somehow. Back to the matter at hand: I think it sounds good, nearly identical to the game, despite coming from one of the games that spit out lightning-fast, all-over-the-place .wavs.

The process I used was basically this: Any sounds that needed to be transposed (i.e. melodic sounds) I ripped right out of the quick .wavs without alteration, and exported at 22Khz as Blitz Lunar suggested. I don't think it had any detrimental effects to rip them as is. For the percussive sounds, I changed the playback rate down to 32Khz (i.e. the playback rate of the actual game), thus tuning the sounds down to the right pitch.

Of course you'll still have to wade through all the strange output of the troublesome games, but I think this experiment proves that despite that you can still rip sounds from them, to no (perceivable) ill effect.

[Chao]

Annoyingly, it's not cooperating and dumping Pokemon Stadium or Kirby 64 >_>;;;