Ripping game soundtrack from various footage?

Rednorka · Dec 5, 2021

I know that ripping music from stuff like trailers, pre-release footage is possible but I have NO idea how these madlads do it.

Consider following examples:
1.
Not sure if this is the exact one but I seen few attempts at taking out SFX from Super Mario Maker 2 trailer song before the game's release.

2.
This game only had some news channel footage but someone managed to isolate almost all the SFX possible to listen to the glorious FM soundtrack of not-yet-released Shovel Knight Dig.

I honestly want to attempt to do so myself and even got a somewhat decent target, Gimmick! EXACT*MIX, an arcade-only remake of Gimmick! for Famicom by Sunsoft, with tons of footage that have the beautiful arranged soundtrack obstructed by SFX.

What are the specific techniques to doing that? I'd appreciate pointing those out to me, preferable on Audacity. No one seems to care about the soundtrack except me :/

FAST6191 · Dec 5, 2021

Most soundtracks are ripped from the games themselves, or CDs if that is a thing for the game. Be it from sound test, from hosted files within the game or from fun with emulators (dropping channels, blanking sound effects in various manners*). Some will also seek better quality hardware (see discussions of various DACs and other chips/output methods as it pertains to different models of SNES or megadrive maybe), maybe even improve things themselves with a visit to an electronics components shop or two.

*main three being make the thing play as mute, make the thing never play and make the thing play but the sound effect it uses be blank.

There was a spell a while back for remaking the Donkey Kong soundtrack when people discovered the synth . You get into questionable territory there (the dev presumably knew what the chip sounded like and worked accordingly).

As you asked about it though and if I had to reconstruct a track from footage that is laced with sound effects there are two main techniques that people would be using.

1) Game music is kind of repetitive by design. Someone more musically inclined than I* would probably spot the core loop of the song on first listen, I might need active consideration for that one.
Anyway isolate progressions and use them to backfill areas that are suffering from overlay. Hopefully you get a nice clean example of the main loop but you might have to go note by note.
You might have to get better still

1a) As noted in the Donkey Kong thing above then if you can figure out what instrument library they are using, or indeed if other instruments are just a pitch tweak of something else (some things might be a simple piano tone say and then pitch bent to the different notes on the scale used) and you can isolate that (in audacity then analyse-plot spectrum) and recreate it. With this you can recreate songs from scratch if you really needed to.

2) If you are exceptionally lucky the sounds will be able to be filtered out. High pass, low pass and all that goodness there. This will tend to be more for things like vocals that are in a narrower band than human hearing is in total and the instruments you want are outside it, however it could happen that an effect is way outside the frequency of the song so you have that as an option.

2a) This I will often employ with some of the hardware methods.
As any schoolboy will tell you then waves can cancel out. In this case you find the sound you don't want similar to above, invert it, align it and it will cancel itself out of the sound. Now you are not going to be left with a clean audio in 99.99% of cases but it will be enough to do something with that is more than silence

*you need not be anywhere near as good as this guy but

Hopefully you do know your trackers though, even if only to understand the options and limitations that the original composer was likely working to. History thereof in the absence of something better. Main open source one is openmpt if you need one.

For the most part there is not going to be much in the way of getting the computer to do it for you -- how do you eat an elephant... one bite at a time. Do also do yourself a favour and check to see if the videos have been released in different forms (languages, footage on a livestream, condensed footage for clip segment)... for while they might not be completely clean a better selection of samples is good to have.

Rednorka · Dec 6, 2021

FAST6191 said:
Most soundtracks are ripped from the games themselves, or CDs if that is a thing for the game. Be it from sound test, from hosted files within the game or from fun with emulators (dropping channels, blanking sound effects in various manners*). Some will also seek better quality hardware (see discussions of various DACs and other chips/output methods as it pertains to different models of SNES or megadrive maybe), maybe even improve things themselves with a visit to an electronics components shop or two...

Thanks for detailed info.

The reason I want to get the soundtrack from the footage is due to inaccessability of the game I want the music from: it's either fly to USA to visit one of the arcades offering it... or pay 4000$ for the whole machine and the game. So unless I can contact people with the equipment and the game footage is the only way for me.

Cancelling out SFX and isolation might be a good way to go for me since I'm not a music mastermind

. SFX in Gimmick! EXACT*MIX seems to be similar to the original but you never know...

One thing though: If there's several footage of the track, is it possible to select parts without SFX and stitch those as well? Would I need to mix them in any way if such stitching is possible?

FAST6191 · Dec 6, 2021

People do dump arcade games -- see MAME (which has some of the best hardware documenation of anything we see in these whole emulation/mod chip/hardware bothering/ROM hacking/... circles) and MESS. Whether they are doing stuff like this I don't know as a lot of it is focused on older things. You are also not necessarily concerned with emulating the game in full as much as pulling the audio data from it and recreating that however you need to (may be quite easy with modern stuff if it is all tracker/software based rather than some of the esoteric hardware of yesteryear). I am however curious if modern arcade setups have headphone ports/similar, bluetooth or hearing aid options that might make for a nice line rip approach (possibly in a sound test or quiet portion of the game -- stand in a corner where no enemies are sort of thing).

You can know if your potentially dubious alternative source is the same. The very same cancellation efforts used on effects if tried on a suitably aligned* track that is supposed to be the same will show differences fairly quickly (not to mention if it is similar enough but not perfect then any differences can be saved as standalone and layered back on top of the base sample -- think drum hit from a stock library but added a bit of reverb to the last fraction).

*can be tricky if the base music is not precisely repeated. By way of example the DS SDAT formats uses a rather crude timer for its internal timing purposes that mean two plays of a track might not be the same to the millisecond, but will the same to probably every ear on the planet (even those that do things in 64 time).

As far as multiple footages. Yeah the point would be to create better samples of track sections to create/Frankenstein a full one from parts, whether you do this by trimming "good" things out from the whole or cancelling things for whatever purposes is going to depend on your preferences and the sources themselves.
I would not bet on them all being the same volume level, and you might face a compression (as in "ew 96kbps MP3 quality" rather than what audio engineers will tend to assume when you say compression, though technically that would be volume), but basically every audio program under the sun (especially audacity if you are already at home with that**) will support volume tweaks aka amplification.

**each individual track will have its own volume command you can even change on the fly as it is playing, plus the whole waveform with levels being there, so maybe use that to figure out what boost (or quietening) you need before playing with the appropriate filter.

As far as "only way" then have you tried sending emails to the devs/composers or if they are on social meeja then contacting them that way (Hi I really like your [name of track]. Is it available anywhere to listen to by itself/can I have a copy/will it be available at some point)? The worst they will say is no sorry/I can't because copyright and even they will probably be delighted someone cares. Might also spare you burning out on the song -- spend 30 hours fiddling with something, which will almost necessarily*** involve you listening to the same parts several hundred times to be sure, and you might well end up sick of it in the end (ask any artist if they view/listen to/experience their own work, mod makers and hackers if they have as much enthusiasm after release, mechanics if they build cars on the weekend... you will get some that do but so many that want to do anything else).

***technically you could do it visually/mathematically but nobody sane will do that for a whole song.

Rednorka · Dec 6, 2021

FAST6191 said:
People do dump arcade games -- see MAME (which has some of the best hardware documenation of anything we see in these whole emulation/mod chip/hardware bothering/ROM hacking/... circles) and MESS. Whether they are doing stuff like this I don't know as a lot of it is focused on older things. You are also not necessarily concerned with emulating the game in full as much as pulling the audio data from it and recreating that however you need to (may be quite easy with modern stuff if it is all tracker/software based rather than some of the esoteric hardware of yesteryear). I am however curious if modern arcade setups have headphone ports/similar, bluetooth or hearing aid options that might make for a nice line rip approach (possibly in a sound test or quiet portion of the game -- stand in a corner where no enemies are sort of thing)...

Although I'd be DELIGHTED to have the full game emulated, I doubt that as a possibility since the hardware's too new and obscure for emulation.

I might try contacting the person responsible for the soundtrack... I recall seeing one of the tweets promoting the game and mentioning the composer!

Regardless, thanks for warning about potential downsides of stitching the good parts. I'll make sure to minimize that.

EDIT: I have concerns about contacting the composer: besides the possibility of them being japanese (potential language barrier), I also saw the tweet mentioning limiting Twitter to "work-related" (thanks Google Translate)... from 2 hours ago. Is it still worth it to contact them or it's better to seek another way to contact?

FAST6191 · Dec 6, 2021

Is it custom hardware? Impressive if so. Most things for the last however many years have been some flavour of PC or minor tweak on then current home console (ever wondered why despite the general failure of MS and the xbox line in Japan that the 360 ended up with so many Japanese shmups?) with attendant ease of ripping things.
Equally even if it is custom hardware for the CPU and graphics then most audio chips in non handheld world are nothing like the ones of yesteryear wherein your composer was generally a skilled programmer in their own right and might only be custom in the sense that they require a specific input format (going back to MS then they often pushed the WMA format) for any wave data but on top of it all they are still playing MOD/s3m/it/whatever or some kind of full wave setup.

As far as contacting the composer (I would include the main devs or possibly pub in this as well as they might also have access to the code/nice rip of the audio, and rights to distribute it that the composer could have signed away) then I would probably still try. I am sure they could be all "if those bloody kids hadn't left me alone then I was planning to release it when I was less busy, however now I shall never do it" but that does not seem likely.

Ripping game soundtrack from various footage?

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