Hey folks. I've got a friend who's interested in:
1) ripping music from PCE roms
2) isolating specific channels
Basically he wants to sample specific parts of specific music tracks for remixes and suchlike.
What are the tools people use for this stuff these days?
Sorry for the basic question!
Hi, most PCE game tunes have been ripped into the .HES format, an archive of which is here: http://hes.joshw.info/
CD game rips are better obtained from here: http://www.snesmusic.org/hoot/kingshriek/
Maybe there is a more complete / up-to-date archive?
The .HES player for WinAmp, named NEZPlug, allows any channel to be isolated or disabled during playback, so I think that covers all that your friend wants to do.
I was looking for something similar, wanna add HES chiptune music to my catalog jukebox player (https://www.pcengine-fx.com/catalog/) but yeah, I found the archive Chris linked too, so lots of work has already been done.
What I found impressive more is the HMTL5 HES player that's somehow been built without Flash and what not. I gotta steal it some time, see how it works.
It's just like the HES Winamp plugin, the sound chip has been emulated in JavaScript (???) and it decodes a chiptune stream of bytes to playable audio by a browser!
http://vgmrips.net/packs/pack/the-legendary-axe-ii-turbografx-16
http://vgmrips.net/packs/pack/dragon-spirit-tg-16
The beauty of it is instead of having 4 meg MP3 files for your music player, you literally only store the sound code chiptune bytes which range as small as 45KB to 1MB per track, so you can have the whole OST at very little bandwidth/space cost, etc.
I also learned they use the Ootake emulator to rip the sound/chiptune bytes out of games, so if your friend still wants to do his own ripping on something, that's one way. I've never seen the feature but that's what I saw stated by a ripper.
Thanks Chris!! That should pretty well cover it all!