Emulation Ripping/Playing GBA music correctly?

[zerowalker]

Hi, i know this question has been asked but i can't find much info on the subject so take the blow and ask anyway!

As topic states i am wondering how to rip GBA music correctly,
as far as my knowledge goes GBA seems to use midi (which i understand is just some multiple channels and sounds being generated realtime to produce sound),
and it uses it's sound engine Sappy for it.
And then there's other sounds which i don't know much about, and i guess luckily is less of a priority in my case.


So ripping is something i can somewhat achieve, i have done it on my Golden Sun 1 & 2.
Thing is, some music sounds odd, while others seems to be right on track.

I thought it was something todo with sf2 (SoundFont) which i understand is a way to tell what instruments it has, essentially the sound of music.
So i thought the sf2 file that was produced with GBAMusRipper would solve the sound when i was able to use it in Foobar2000.
But sadly that wasn't the case, i can't really notice any difference when i change the midi settings at all:S


So here i am hoping to be illuminated with the answer to the question of the decade

PS:

I can provide 2 samples of how the ingame version sounds compared to the ripped version.
Not sure about the legalities though but i guess 15 sec would be fine and within fair use, but i leave that up to the moderators to decide.

 

[FAST6191]

Golden Sun is one of the more interesting games for music (there is a reason you will see people test it on weaker emulators for weaker devices). I have not seen what goes for the ripping set and troubles it might cause them.


Anyway yeah most games use what is known as the sappy format in ROM hacking and ROM ripping circles. Various versions of sappy exist and are twisted for different games. There are also other tools and documents that can interact with it.
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/881/
and at least a version of sappy because why not
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/948/
http://www.feshrine.net/hacking/doc.php has some with a focus on Fire Emblem, not my favourite guides on the audio hacking front but a different perspective and some like it.
Not sure what https://sourceforge.net/projects/vgmtoolbox/ has these days (for other formats it is a top notch tool)
https://github.com/vgmtrans/vgmtrans also has a measure of support.

Guide to the format http://www.romhacking.net/documents/462/ (same guy did the Final Fantasy restoration mods so yeah).
Hardware for the sound
https://web.archive.org/web/20181012020401/http://belogic.com/gba/
https://deku.gbadev.org/program/sound1.html
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbasoundcontroller
https://www.cs.rit.edu/~tjh8300/CowBite/CowBiteSpec.htm#Sound Controls
and
https://www.hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php is a forum where many really really good audio hackers appear on. Not necessarily just for the GBA but it is within their purview.


Some games use other formats, Krawall being the more popular there
https://gbatemp.net/threads/unkrawertergba-a-tool-to-rip-krawall-engine-music-from-gba-games.570236/

Probably should get around to writing this all up properly for my hacking docs -- had the GBA audio section as almost a placeholder for some years now.

 

[zerowalker]

Thanks for the information dump, will be checking it all out!

 

[Noctumsempra]

Hello everyone.

Has anyone been able to rip music from "Prince of tennis 2004" (either Stylish Silver / Glorius Gold) ??
Cause I can't get to do it nor I get any accurate information about how to rip the OSTs and sounds in that game, please!

Thanks in advance.