Okay, first off, it is perfectly LEGAL to rip game music if you own the game. Don't rip ingame music if you don't have the game. :nono:

Oh hell!

You are merely making a backup copy
of what you already own and leaving it on your hard drive for future use.
However, it is ILLEGAL for you to put any of the music you have copied onto the
Internet. This includes, but is not limited to, placing the sound files as
downloads on your personal homepage or a corporate music collection or sharing
the files on a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing network such as Kazaa, iMesh and
Grokster. You may NOT distribute these files between you and other
acquaintances through an electronic file transfer (via a network or the
Internet), or removable media such as CDs, DVDs and floppy disks. :)

Now that thats outta the way, can anyone direct me to a site where I can learn how to rip game music? Or, if you're the nerd, post a nice little guide on how to rip music from games. I know we can rip PS2 music, but I've heard that its impossible for XBox users. :huh:

I found some guides but they're only for one particular game (Vice City) and I'm not interested in that, I wanna know how to rip the music from True Crime: SoLA. I OWN THE GAME, so I think I have the right to do that. Help please.

Thanks. :thumbsup:

if anyone did actually know how to do it, you probably offended them too much by calling them a nerd to want to help you out :D

http://www.ultrace.com/uost/disgaea/

This guy provides some helpful tips as to how to rip PS2 music as well as pointing to a program that will assist.

Thanks dude! ;) Nice link. I also checked out this program called GAP (Game Audio Player) but its really limited.

Thanks for the quick feedback. :)

By rip do you mean recording the music while you paly using a PC, or putting the disk in your PC and converting the audio file/s to a format like mp3?

I think he means the latter.

He means extracting music from a game into a normal audio format like wma, mp3 or redbook.

Yeah, converting redbook and all those audio formats into mp3 so that I can listen to 'em on my player. :thumbsup:

I wouldn't mind knowing how to do this either as I've got some games that have cool music. Previously I "ripped" the music from NFSU by hooking up my Cube to the PC, then going to EA Trax menu and playing the songs while the PC recorded it all. In the end it doesn't sound as good though.

Or you could just download the songs....

Agreed.

I know of a site that provides links to peoples FTPs which have lots of High Quality OST's that are out of print or extremely hard to come-by. If you want the link, throw a PM this way. :thumbsup:

Anyways, back to ripping songs out of your own games...with PC games you usually don't have to ripp anything, you just need to simply move the files from one directory to another, and (sometimes) change the file extention.(though most media players will be able to figure out what format the songs are anyway)

Check to see your soundtrack isn't here first.

Yeah, thats a good site for SNES songs as well. :)

Here is also a good place for SNES songs:
http://www.snesmusic.org/

You can get them to play through Winamp like normal songs, and they are a fraction of the size of MP3s! :D

BTW, since this is a music thread, I think I'll move it to the Film & Tv Forum. ;)

Mmm, there's a heap of them. Most of them you can get a Zophar, I think. There's also N64, NES, GB, GBA...

I don't wanna dld any music off the net, sorry. I wanna do it myself, with the game I own and my PC. Keep posting links.
Thanks.

For ripping game music, there's two options available. The first, and easiest in some respects, is to do an audio recording. If you've got a good soundcard (I'd recommend at least an SB Audigy) and a good audio editing program (I recommend CoolEdit), you can come off with some spectacular results. The downside to this is that it will require you to play through all the music you have to record, and in some cases, it's impossible to accomplish because music in the game may have sound effects or people speaking over it. Games with sound tests, especially those that let you access all the music from the beginning (KOTOR II, anyone?) are a Godsend for this.

If you simply must have perfection, you may be out of luck. Extracting game music for perfect digital copies is only available on games from the CD/DVD era (no carts), and only on some platforms. It is possible to pull music from an XBox, but it requires duplicating and reformatting the DVD of the game in ways which I have not been able to track down yet. Doing so for a GC game requires special hardware or firmware upgrades to your computer's DVD player, from what I understand, neither of which I've been willing to go through yet in order to try it.

There is some limited ability to pull music from Saturn and Dreamcast games, although doing understanding of Saturn formats and emulation is still limited, and to read DC games you again need special hardware or firmware mods to your DVD player to read the GD-Rom disc the game uses.

Sega CD, Turbografx CD, Neo Geo CD (and a few PS1 and Saturn games) generally stored music in redbook CD format meaning you could pop it into your computer's CD player and just rip the tracks directly. No special explanation needed there. Interesting to note that even on some PS1 and Saturn games where the music can be extracted from the disc, there are additional redbook tracks on the CDs themselves that often do not even appear in the game. Try checking out Astal on the Saturn for a vocal track not heard in the NA release, or the import version of Castlevania: Nocturne in the Moonlight on PS1 for a nifty arranged track that's never used.

PC games often store music in .wav, .mp3, .wma or some proprietary format that is based off one of these. With a little experimentation, you can usually extract their music in full. Neverwinter Nights and Final Fantasy XI are examples of some easily extracted games.

For the best extraction, you're pretty much left with the PS1 and PS2. There are various tools around the net for these. The most popular encoded format for the PS1 back in the day was .XA (including .XAI, .XA1, etc.) which was a compressed music format. My favorite files for this were XAEX and XA2WAV, but they do not work in the XP environment, only on Win95 (and possibly 98) and I don't have another machine set up with a different OS to use them. There are other utilities around that are purported to do the same function, such as PSMPlay and Playstation XA Copier but I haven't used them much.

For Playstation 2 music, the tool of choice is MFAudio, which can locate and track down many of the formats used in PS2 games. The downside is that, as you may have seen from reading my page, you have to tell it where to look, many times. Also, there is fiddling involved in trying to set up bitrates and interleaves. Get your interleave off by too much and you'll get almost nothing but static, which could leave you thinking you've got the wrong file or wrong part of it. Keep at it and you'll succeed.

When trying to extract music from any format, look for big files. Unless the the music is stored in a synth format (the equivalent of MIDI for the console), the files are going to be big, even compressed, probably bigger than anything else on the disc except for maybe movie files. Most RPGs, due to their extensive soundtracks, are going to store the files in synth, although there are some notable exceptions like Suikoden, I believe.

Anyway, hopefully this will help. Always trying to encourage more people to get into the hobby of preserving game music... ;)

Yo thanks Ultrace, hope you stick around, this forum needs more members like you. :thumbsup: Nice site you got going there too.

If you're still hanging around, have you ever tried extracting music from True Crimes: Streets of LA? I searched all over the place but can't find any programs or anything to help me out! :( But I'll try MFAudio. BTW, have you used GAP before, if so, how'd you find it? Any good?
Thanks.

Sadly, I haven't even gotten around to playing TCSoLA (although it's on my Gamefly queue)... About the closest I've come is extracting the radio stations from GTA3 and Vice City... A far cry, of course. Try MFAudio on the bigger files you find in the game DVD. If the game's music isn't stored in a proprietary PS2 format like .SS2 or such, then you'll probably find it bundled up with a lot of other game data in a .BIN or similar file. It'll be a few weeks before I have the game in my hands, but I'll be sure to check back in if you haven't had any luck...

I haven't done much work with GAP. It seems mostly (if not entirely) focused on pulling music from PC games and while there are a lot of those with good soundtracks (might be worth it just for the original Gabriel Knight alone), I've always been more into the arcade/console music scene. But I'm glad the tool is out there for use, at least...

And where can I find this MFAudio?

EDIT: Found it. I've got version 1.1 - an up-to-date version?

Yes, 1.1 is the most recent version that I know of. Basically, it hasn't been updated in just about ever. I guess the author considers this version complete enough. It's a pity--I would have liked the option to force it to scan through an entire binary file without stopping at any false positive track-end points. It would make isolating music files much easier.

V1.1 is tiny in size: 57.0 kb. And I don't know how to use it.

I'm currently trying to decode the music from Dj:Decks and FX. I think I've found the music file - it's got an appropriate name and is 1.6gig in size. I've tried fiddling around with the frequency setting and offset, but to no avail, so I'm stumped.

DJ:D&FX has some sweet music in it - about 80 song's worth. If worst comes to worst, I'll just have to record them onto MiniDisc, then onto my laptop.