DKC Atlas Forum

[TheAvengerButton]

I'm sorry if this avenue has already been explored and that this is a waste of time, but I recently ripped all this sound stuff from DKC3 GBA, just to see if there was any way I could get the actual music samples from the game without them being actual full songs. I pulled it off using Audacity's Import Raw Data feature, and I actually managed to get (for the most part) isolated samples. Some of them are what I would call riffs, as they seem to be pre-composed. But there are individual sounds as well, certain piano notes and such. And of course, a lot of them aren't actually tuned to how they are in the game. I managed to recreate the guitar riff from the Stilt Village track in Audacity by slowing down the audio speed, so that was pretty cool.

I guess my eventual goal would be to recreate the GBA audio in stereo, and hopefully in a good enough quality so we don't have to mess with the mono tracks anymore, but I don't know if I can do this on my own. I pretty much got to where I am now out of sheer luck, so I would appreciate some guidance to get to my goal.

Here's the dumped collection, not yet separated into actual individual files. I imported it at 9000 Hz, because any higher than that and it is an abnormal tempo and pitch.

http://rapidshare.com/share/F2CF0A5281D16816499BD4D3E19B45F6

Having never used Rapidshare, I hope that link works for you guys.

[Simion32]

What a rip! Great job!

It would be nice if you use FLAC (converted from the WAVs) for the final sfx format and not mp3 or any other lossy format.

SFX are pretty small already, and lossy compression is just going to make the sound files less useful/accurate.

Thanks in advance.

[TheAvengerButton]

Yeah, that's just a sampler. I wasn't intending to use it for any other purpose. When I actually separate each individual thing I will make them all a better quality.

Thanks for the kind words and encouragement

[!!!!!]

If only someone cracked the RARE GBA Audio Engine like the Sappy engine so the sequences could be dumped and then perfect restructuring would be possible.

[TheAvengerButton]

If only that were the case, that would make this a lot easier. Or Wise surprise us all by releasing high quality versions of this stuff.

It seems like everything was prerecorded in some sort of program or synthesizer and then imported into the PCM slot in the rom. Each GBA game comes with 4 slots (the standard GB wave slots) and the PCM slot, where you could put most anything. So if the songs were prerecorded, it stands to reason he may still have the original, higher quality samples of all of this stuff somewhere.

But as far as this project is going, I'm slowly making my way through the 10 or so minutes of PCM sound data and separating everything by instrument and riff. It's hard though, not being as familiar with the GBA soundtrack as with the original SNES trilogy soundtracks since it's relatively new. I'm having a hard time identifying what should be split into different sections or kept whole. But I've been pounding the new soundtrack into my head lately. It's playing on Repeat All on my iPod whenever I'm not at home or I'm taking a break from the process. I'm also planning on making a "Ultimate DKC3 Soundtrack" for me, personally. A mix of the best of the Wise and the Fischer (Novakovic) material.

Anyway, don't expect good results any time soon. A lot of the instruments and riffs need to be re-pitched for accuracy to the original songs, and I haven't even gotten to that stage of this process yet.

[TheAvengerButton]

I am pretty much finished separating the tracks. I've only been focusing on the music for now, but I know there are a few people here who would probably want the SFX, too. So I am going to go back after I look after these instruments and separate those individual sounds, which shouldn't take as long as the music stuff.

The most frustrating thing about this project is the fact that there should be a way to remake these instruments into higher quality soundfont/midi, like GBAMusRiper can. Basically, the ripping process is skipped (the thing that GBAMusRiper actually does), and then there should be a way to make these into higher quality soundfonts like that program does as well so that when I put these songs back together they'd sound excellent. But apparently that's not as possible as I thought. They sound great already, and these stereo remakes are going to be excellent when they are put together, but I still think there is a way to make these GBAMusRiper quality.

[TheAvengerButton]

Bump. Me again. I stopped doing this because I got seriously distracted by Tropical Freeze and put this aside, but the music samples are separated. Rapidshare is now weird, so I don't know what I can do to upload these files, but you guys should have them. So...any ideas?

[Qyzbud]

There's always the option of uploading here as an attachment; I'm not sure what kind of file size the archive is, but hopefully it can squeeze under the 5MB attachment limit. If not, you could always split the samples into two archives — one for instruments, one for other sounds.

Just a suggestion.

[VideoViking]

Do you think you could do a file list report? This is where you use a DOS command to print the list of files from a selected directory to a text document. If I had that, I could probably give you a good solution.

[TheAvengerButton]

Okay, nevermind. I think I've solved my own problem.

Below are the two folders. Samples is all the music samples. They are WAV, so I hope that's okay. I did WAV because I don't have much experience with FLAC. I also didn't know what to call any of the individual files, so I named them to the best of my ability. If you guys want to come to a consensus about actual file names, I would be totally fine with that. Uhh, otherwise, the music samples are organized by the song they appear, and also just the individual music samples that Wise used throughout the tracks. All I did to the original file was split the audio that was already there in the raw data. I didn't bother to actually modify anything. Also, I have a sample of Rockface Rumble that I threw together real quick. I put the instruments in stereo as demonstration to what you can do with these samples. I had to manually adjust the speed at which some of the samples were played, but that's really the only issue that comes from this process. Someone (or I guess a lot of someones) who is more talented than me could probably do this soundtrack justice in recreation.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/q51b4q4m29i4pce/Samples.zip

http://www.mediafire.com/listen/g3rk3r1gcg6y9mb/rockfacesample.mp3

I recommend this be listened to with headphones to get the full effect.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/bkg0qk7bqx7mt4c/DKC3GBA+SFX.zip

Here's the SFX Library. I actually avoided naming these, because I didn't know what to call them as well and I figured if this was going to become a project that there could be a consensus on what to call the files and how to organize them.

I hope this is all satisfactory. I must reiterate that all I did was separate the large file into individual, unaltered samples.