I'm looking for a Nintendo DS tracker, for PC.

[Die Antwoord]

I was interested in playing with the Nintendo DS sound engine. I've used Deflemask a bit. From brief research trying to find leads I've found things like Nitro Tracker and Maxmod, but I think these are supposed to run on the Nintendo DS itself, I want something for PC but haven't found anything like that. Is the way to do this to run Nitro Tracker/Max Mod on an emulator?

Post automatically merged: Sep 6, 2023

Actually upon further research today, learning how DS is structured & all, this is not what I want at all it seems...
So I think I've learned people do this by extracting sbnk, midi, sseq etc. files from the rom itself, edit the midi, insert it back into the game and playback the song via nitrostudio or something similar. Sounds a bit complex, but for now I'm just wondering is it possible to extract the individual instruments themselves from the game files?

 

[FAST6191]

I am not quite sure what you are heading for.

If you want to play music on the DS* of your own design there are a few trackers ranging from commercial things like the Korg player to actual music games (electroplankton on up) to a whole load of nice homebrew (I always liked meraman's piano keyboard program) that more easily allow you to save things out.

*you mentioned a sound engine. Obviously there is one but it is mostly just 16 channels of wave playback in the hardware itself rather than anything fun like you might see in older systems. No inbuilt sample libraries or particularly shared ones between games (Nintendo provided something but enough did their own thing that there is not a de facto one). To that end the "sound" of the DS is more of just dealing with the sub par DAC they saw fit to include.

You asked about ripping instruments. Within sdat there are sbnk files which in turn reference the swav (possibly in swar form) files. A variety of things exist to turn it into an instrument library (some prefer the term sound font). I usually have a hard time with this and a lot of popular players (openmpt being almost impossible to get something nice going on despite supposedly supporting various things, though I have not checked in a while. Others have had some luck smacking ableton or fl studio hard enough that something happens, though they tend to just wing it and import things back in as you mentioned).

What you may also want to play with is a program called vgmtrans. https://github.com/vgmtrans/vgmtrans It is not going to be a full on note editor like big boy trackers but will get you closer than most other things or playing with silly leaked SDK files for injection purposes.

If you want playback then sf2 audio format, most people using vgmtoolbox (not sure if the needed files are available these days, there were hard to get a while back) to make them, had some nice things. If you just wanted playback of things you downloaded then the usual suspects for this sort of thing (foobar, winamp et al) have said 2sf playback plugins or native support.

 

[TheStonedModder]

Maybe this is what you’re looking for?

https://division-6.com/products/midify/