Homebrew disable music without disabling SFX

[Reshiram_Addict]

is there any way to use an emulator to disable the music in the game without disabling the sound effects?? I want to do some wav recording of sound effects only.... is it possible to do??? if so, please post instructions (be as specific as possible)

 

[LeRodeur]

is there any way to use an emulator to disable the music in the game without disabling the sound effects?? I want to do some wav recording of sound effects only.... is it possible to do??? if so, please post instructions (be as specific as possible)

Dont really think its possible or never heard about it, it would mean that you could disable only mod audios, but you can try extracting the row data with nds tools and open it with audacity if you only want a record

 

[loco365]

Or if you know how, replace all BGM with a silent note.

 

[FAST6191]

I would opt for Team Fail's method (it has been done a few times- find the audio tracks which are usually SSEQ files and point them to a bad location (outside the file say) and it will play silence instead- http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=122534&hl= ) if the standard method of opening up the audio options of the emulator and dropping channels until you lose whatever (granted 90% of the time this is to lose SFX to rip background music but it works the other way as well).

I will mention though that you mighty be able to grab SFX by more conventional ripping techniques.

 

[loco365]

I would opt for Team Fail's method (it has been done a few times- find the audio tracks which are usually SSEQ files and point them to a bad location (outside the file say) and it will play silence instead- http://gbatemp.net/i...opic=122534&hl= ) if the standard method of opening up the audio options of the emulator and dropping channels until you lose whatever (granted 90% of the time this is to lose SFX to rip background music but it works the other way as well).

I will mention though that you mighty be able to grab SFX by more conventional ripping techniques.

There is only one thing I am still attempting to do- change what soundbank and sound wave archive an SSEQ plays from. I'd like to insert new soundbanks and wave archives into Black and White without overwriting old ones and replace some SSEQ files. Fun fun fun.

And if you replace a soundbank and wave archive, it's way easier than modifying all the SSEQ files.

 

[iSubaru]

Why not extracting SFX file and playing it? With good SoundFont You can get near-exact effect (where near-exact means You will accept what You get)
Of course You should not try to do it with Microsoft SW Synth stuff...without hiding truth it sounds like sh...*ahem* like a doing poo

 

[Reshiram_Addict]

I would opt for Team Fail's method (it has been done a few times- find the audio tracks which are usually SSEQ files and point them to a bad location (outside the file say) and it will play silence instead- http://gbatemp.net/i...opic=122534&hl= ) if the standard method of opening up the audio options of the emulator and dropping channels until you lose whatever (granted 90% of the time this is to lose SFX to rip background music but it works the other way as well).

I will mention though that you mighty be able to grab SFX by more conventional ripping techniques.

There is only one thing I am still attempting to do- change what soundbank and sound wave archive an SSEQ plays from. I'd like to insert new soundbanks and wave archives into Black and White without overwriting old ones and replace some SSEQ files. Fun fun fun.

And if you replace a soundbank and wave archive, it's way easier than modifying all the SSEQ files.

that I think you linked me to the WRONG forum!!! that is some question regarding Audioswapping!!! (which I am NOT trying to do!!!)(and I am totally lost here!!!)

 

[loco365]

I would opt for Team Fail's method (it has been done a few times- find the audio tracks which are usually SSEQ files and point them to a bad location (outside the file say) and it will play silence instead- http://gbatemp.net/i...opic=122534&hl= ) if the standard method of opening up the audio options of the emulator and dropping channels until you lose whatever (granted 90% of the time this is to lose SFX to rip background music but it works the other way as well).

I will mention though that you mighty be able to grab SFX by more conventional ripping techniques.

There is only one thing I am still attempting to do- change what soundbank and sound wave archive an SSEQ plays from. I'd like to insert new soundbanks and wave archives into Black and White without overwriting old ones and replace some SSEQ files. Fun fun fun.

And if you replace a soundbank and wave archive, it's way easier than modifying all the SSEQ files.

that I think you linked me to the WRONG forum!!! that is some question regarding Audioswapping!!! (which I am NOT trying to do!!!)(and I am totally lost here!!!)

That's about the only way to do it, unless you can extract WAV files. You'd have to audioswap with a piece of audio that emits no noise.

 

[Reshiram_Addict]

I would opt for Team Fail's method (it has been done a few times- find the audio tracks which are usually SSEQ files and point them to a bad location (outside the file say) and it will play silence instead- http://gbatemp.net/i...opic=122534&hl= ) if the standard method of opening up the audio options of the emulator and dropping channels until you lose whatever (granted 90% of the time this is to lose SFX to rip background music but it works the other way as well).

I will mention though that you mighty be able to grab SFX by more conventional ripping techniques.

There is only one thing I am still attempting to do- change what soundbank and sound wave archive an SSEQ plays from. I'd like to insert new soundbanks and wave archives into Black and White without overwriting old ones and replace some SSEQ files. Fun fun fun.

And if you replace a soundbank and wave archive, it's way easier than modifying all the SSEQ files.

that I think you linked me to the WRONG forum!!! that is some question regarding Audioswapping!!! (which I am NOT trying to do!!!)(and I am totally lost here!!!)

That's about the only way to do it, unless you can extract WAV files. You'd have to audioswap with a piece of audio that emits no noise.

BUT THAT POST DOESN'T SHOW HOW TO DO THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! unless someone can do it for me........ I need the sound effects from the following attacks in Pokémon Black & White........

Bolt Strike
Blue Flare
Heat Wave
Attract (including the in love sound effect)
Dragon pulse


since nobody is linking me how to do it myself and I need the sound effects for songs I am doing, can someone get the audio for these attacks and upload a zip archive with these sounds on media fire or something............

 

[FAST6191]

You were told though and indeed pointed at three methods that might do for you, it just required a minor tweak on the logic of the conventional methods or reapplication thereof (most people do not care for the sound effects as far as ripping things goes and indeed may encounter a point where they have to get rid of the them to get a proper rip).

1) Was the conventional audio rip. SFX are usually SWAR and other archives of files which are readily converted (indeed they are probably easier to convert that SSEQ audio which does most game audio by virtue of the fact they are largely various forms of PCM audio in a wrapper.
http://gbatemp.net/topic/305167-the-various-audio-formats-of-the-ds/ has some basics on how it works although I should note MKDS course modifier got some nice sound abilities recently.

2) If you do the audio swap but rather than point to new/different audio you point outside the file (make the address it thinks a file it is at is beyond the file or the length of the file 00) or otherwise to something it can not decode it plays silence instead- it is the exact same sections and parts thereof that gets changed. Indeed that is what was done for the earlier castlevania portrait of ruin stability hack and some similar ones for pokemon.
This was linked already.

3) Run the rom in desmume and open up the sound options (I only have an old version in front of me but it is under tools -> sound state but regardless of what it is called in later versions it will be along with the disassembler, tile viewer, memory viewer and such). Here you will be presented with 16 channels (8 per "screen") each of which tends to be given over to making some aspect of the sound (it all layers up to create the audio of the game). Now it is not always completely straightforward and games can skip around but usually if you find the channels responsible for the sounds you do not want (most of the time this is actually music without the SFX but as you want SFX so be it).
From here you can either use the sound dumping options of desmume (file -> record wav) or loopback audio options if your sound setup should support it (most do).
Some people add in elements of 2 to make sure the sounds being played are the ones that are needed or appear more commonly.

 

[Reshiram_Addict]

You were told though and indeed pointed at three methods that might do for you, it just required a minor tweak on the logic of the conventional methods or reapplication thereof (most people do not care for the sound effects as far as ripping things goes and indeed may encounter a point where they have to get rid of the them to get a proper rip).

1) Was the conventional audio rip. SFX are usually SWAR and other archives of files which are readily converted (indeed they are probably easier to convert that SSEQ audio which does most game audio by virtue of the fact they are largely various forms of PCM audio in a wrapper.
http://gbatemp.net/t...mats-of-the-ds/ has some basics on how it works although I should note MKDS course modifier got some nice sound abilities recently.

2) If you do the audio swap but rather than point to new/different audio you point outside the file (make the address it thinks a file it is at is beyond the file or the length of the file 00) or otherwise to something it can not decode it plays silence instead- it is the exact same sections and parts thereof that gets changed. Indeed that is what was done for the earlier castlevania portrait of ruin stability hack and some similar ones for pokemon.
This was linked already.

3) Run the rom in desmume and open up the sound options (I only have an old version in front of me but it is under tools -> sound state but regardless of what it is called in later versions it will be along with the disassembler, tile viewer, memory viewer and such). Here you will be presented with 16 channels (8 per "screen") each of which tends to be given over to making some aspect of the sound (it all layers up to create the audio of the game). Now it is not always completely straightforward and games can skip around but usually if you find the channels responsible for the sounds you do not want (most of the time this is actually music without the SFX but as you want SFX so be it).
From here you can either use the sound dumping options of desmume (file -> record wav) or loopback audio options if your sound setup should support it (most do).
Some people add in elements of 2 to make sure the sounds being played are the ones that are needed or appear more commonly.

so I see the soundstate but there is NO way to disable or mute ANY channels!!! it just shows all the channels!!! there is NO option to mute ANY of them or disable or just dump a cerain channel!!!!!!!!!!

 

[avenir]

http://gbatemp.net/topic/306997-nds-music-player/

construct sps then open it using nds music player. It is meant for music but (as pokemon BW uses sseq, not sseqarc) you can hear sound effects.

 

[Reshiram_Addict]

http://gbatemp.net/t...s-music-player/

construct sps then open it using nds music player. It is meant for music but (as pokemon BW uses sseq, not sseqarc) you can hear sound effects.

how is that done??? that link only tells how to download NDS Player!!! but I have NO idea how to get the sseq files from the games!!!!!

http://gbatemp.net/t...s-music-player/

construct sps then open it using nds music player. It is meant for music but (as pokemon BW uses sseq, not sseqarc) you can hear sound effects.

IT DOESN'T WORK WITH THE EMULATOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IT ALWAYS SAYS 'FILESYSTEM FAIL'!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

---

 

[raulpica]

Their responses are perfectly good, if you can't understand them, then that's your problem.

 

[FAST6191]

Others have tried to be polite and usually I would carry on ignoring things but you are making it very hard for that to continue and chief among those is your continued typing in capitals and overuse of exclamation marks.

So far you have had at least three hackers that have done a fair bit in DS sound hacking work and maybe even could be said to be noted for their work in it and several others that certainly know what they are doing give you viable methods, viable guides and viable alternatives should one of those methods fall short. In your defence some of those required a tiny leap of logic and some understanding of how files and methods work which admittedly not everybody is cut out for and there is no shame in not being able to do such things although it certainly does not excuse acting the fool.

For most others someone would have served it up on a silver platter or held your hand but the twenty or so minutes it would take to generate the pictures and sort it all for that tends to be the sort of efforts reserved for those that engage in civil conversation. I am bored and I hope some of this could be salvaged at a later date for a proper guide so

A runthrough of a handful of the methods
I got a version of the US pokemon black and ripped it apart, the sound file is called "wb_sound_data.sdat" and is found in the data folder as extracted by ndstool (the first main directory where all the files usually sit if you are using a different method). Many of these tools do not require it to be extracted but it is nicer to do so.

Sound ripping
I decided to go with the big three and ignore any recent developments or older tools as hey.

NDSSNDEXT
Filetrip download
I fed it the sound file. It chugged along for a while (although to be fair it does have nearly 4000 subfiles*). I was greeted with a bunch of wave files many of which sounded someone bashed their head on an electric sampling xlyophone so after double checking I had not hacked pokemon blue by mistake I concluded that I had indeed sourced all the pokemon SFX even if the midi was a bit clunky but damned if I was going to figure out what was what.

*which morphs to closer to 7000 by the time all is said and done.

VGMtrans
http://gbatemp.net/u...3_143_59616.jpg
Right click the highlighted sections (I have no idea which ones you want) and you should be able to save it as a common format (or if you prefer as the original file/format).
I noticed the last version was not up on filetrip so I upped it
http://filetrip.net/...ns-9_29_09.html

VGMtoolbox
Links might be a bit harder here (you should be able to get something done from http://gbatemp.net/t...mats-of-the-ds/ though)
Still I gave it a spin

In defence of my machine I was doing at lot at this point in time and running on the last few gigs of very fragmented hard drive space.
http://gbatemp.net/u...3_143_22941.jpg
It also generated a wonderful SMAP file which you can see a sample of in a moment

# SEQ:
# label					 number fileID bnk vol cpr ppr ply	  hsize	   size name
...
...
...
...
SEQ_BGM_DUMMY			   1000	  11001  65  30  64   0				  8032 SeqSEQ_BGM_DUMMY.sseq
SEQ_BGM_SILENCE_FIELD	   1001	  21002  65  30  64   0					48 SeqSEQ_BGM_SILENCE_FIELD.sseq
SEQ_BGM_SILENCE_DUNGEON	 1002	  21002  65  30  64   0					48 SeqSEQ_BGM_SILENCE_DUNGEON.sseq
SEQ_BGM_TITLE			   1003	  31003  92  30  64   6				  5104 SeqSEQ_BGM_TITLE.sseq
SEQ_BGM_TITLE01			 1004	  41004  93  30  64   6				  3240 SeqSEQ_BGM_TITLE01.sseq
SEQ_BGM_OPENING_TITLE_B	 1005	  21002  65  30  64   0					48 SeqSEQ_BGM_OPENING_TITLE_B.sseq
SEQ_BGM_OPENING_TITLE_W	 1006	  21002  65  30  64   0					48 SeqSEQ_BGM_OPENING_TITLE_W.sseq
SEQ_BGM_POKEMON_THEME	   1007	  51007 106  30  64   6				 20136 SeqSEQ_BGM_POKEMON_THEME.sseq
SEQ_BGM_STARTING			1008	  61008  45  30  64   0				  1728 SeqSEQ_BGM_STARTING.sseq
SEQ_BGM_STARTING2		   1009	  71008  90  30  64   0				  6208 SeqSEQ_BGM_STARTING2.sseq
SEQ_BGM_SHINKA			  1010	  81010  68  30  64   0				   176 SeqSEQ_BGM_SHINKA.sseq
SEQ_BGM_KOUKAN			  1011	  91011  76  30  64   0				  5364 SeqSEQ_BGM_KOUKAN.sseq
SEQ_BGM_BICYCLE			 1012	 101012  82  30  64   0				 10832 SeqSEQ_BGM_BICYCLE.sseq
...
...
...

That method is somewhat besides the point though as we tend to use it for the 2SF abilities.
http://gbatemp.net/u...3_143_54732.jpg
Even the current version seemed to have issues with this though but hey there are other methods before we have to start doing things to make it accept it (also I think I might have gone wrong somewhere).

Sound swapping/relinking.
In the guide linked http://gbatemp.net/i...opic=122534&hl= a few posts in I cover a basic method to relink sounds. This is usually done when you want to change what music plays where (probably to get rid of the annoying default song) but rather than changing the sound to something you can point it right outside the player or make it think the sound is 0 long.
Even nicer than that though this rom should make your life even easier as looking at the other methods and ripping a copy to test there is a nice file called SEQ_BGM_SILENCE_FIELD which does exactly what it says on the tin.
Here is is highlighted on crystlatile2's readout ( http://filetrip.net/...2010-09-06.html in case you did not have a copy of the program).
http://gbatemp.net/u..._143_135026.jpg

Further hint you want to replace all the SSEQ entries for music at least (it does seem to abuse the tracker format for SFX unlike most other games as avenir said).
0003 6040 becomes 4060 0300 and the length section is 48 decimal or 30h
Each line then wants to read "0000 0000 4060 0300 3000 0000 0000 0000" aka the location and size of the silent sound file (others reading if it was not silent this method is a bit cowboy style as it does not take into account any changes in audio banks that might have occurred, it does not matter though if you are pointing outside the file or zero sizing everything).

Desmume channel muting.
Don't know what went wrong for you, busted out a copy of desmume and loaded the rom (hopefully my street cred remains intact and they accept the excuse I was playing pokemon for science and possibly a passive aggressive post).
Just to make sure I did not have some legacy functionality or something from a beta (I was using an old SVN build) grabbed the latest and greatest from the site
http://gbatemp.net/u..._143_100619.jpg
Clicking each of those tick boxes (and again for the next 8 channels after you click the V in the top left) does indeed mute the channels and change the audio. This just feels crude though (indeed this trick is my third most disliked method after using a microphone and using a line in cable)

Note you can improve this method by doing the audio swap/relink hack from above to make sure you have no stray sounds during your ripping.

Also as for avenir's suggestion homebrew takes a bit of effort to get running in desmume. http://wiki.desmume....flash_emulation in combination with http://dldi.drunkencoders.com/ might help (I had some troubles when I was trying to do something a few months back but it turned out I was trying to skip steps despite knowing far better than to try that when doing technical things I am not entirely clear on).

Either way once there you find the sound and record it out. Desmume has nice options which I suggest you use over a lookback/grabbing program unless you can argue otherwise.

 

[rehevkor]

WHY IS EVERYBODY GIVING ME GARBAGE RESPONSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Folks are only trying to help, this kinda attitude won't encourage people to help further.

 

[Reshiram_Addict]

I don't understand the hex editor tutorial you gave here!!!!!!!! http://gbatemp.net/topic/122534-audio-swapping-question/


I am STILL lost no matter how many times I read it!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[jurassicplayer]

I don't understand the hex editor tutorial you gave here!!!!!!!! http://gbatemp.net/t...pping-question/
I am STILL lost no matter how many times I read it!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you can't understand that, then I'm afraid you should just give up because the posts I saw in that thread aren't hard to understand at all.

 

[pasc]

ehm, since this thread is still open and opening a new one seems like a waste:

Is the opposite, e.g. disabling the SFX and only recording the BGM also possible ?

I'd like Nanostray 2's Soundtrack, but it seems rather hard to do with the SFX in the way.

 

[loco365]

ehm, since this thread is still open and opening a new one seems like a waste:

Is the opposite, e.g. disabling the SFX and only recording the BGM also possible ?

I'd like Nanostray 2's Soundtrack, but it seems rather hard to do with the SFX in the way.

If it uses the standard SSEQ format (Just open it in VGMTrans to see. If it shows various songs, it works), use VGMToolBox to rip .2sf files, and convert them to WAV using Winamp.