Sega Saturn game music
 

Hey all - I'm definitely a newbie to this stuff, but after a few google sessions I was unable to come up with an answer to my (seemingly common) question. Here it goes:

I have a lot of Sega Saturn games that I would like to pop into my computer and listen to (and preferably rip) the music. Someone said to open the game disc with Windows Media Player 10 and try and rip the audio that way - I couldn't get that to work (I saw "Track 1" with a time of 3 seconds). Others mentioned products like Nero, but before I run around I figured I'd ask over here. Anyone have experience with ripping music from Sega Saturn cds?

I always thought Saturn discs could double as audio cds and let you just play the tracks. I only tried Legend of Oasis - I'll try some other discs in the meantime.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Additional Spam:
Just an update that Rayman works. I was able to pop the disc in and rip the Tracks. Legend of Oasis didn't and I'm not sure what the difference is. I'll keep on trying with some other games I have.

Only when your game uses CD-DA as its music can you rip it by WMP and the like. Sadly, an emulated format for Sega Saturn has not formulated yet.

Music has been done several different ways on Saturn games. This is something I need to research on again when I'm ready to rip my own games. As of now, I only recall that early titles like Virtua Cop and Daytona USA use Redbook audio (simply rip the CD tracks), some Capcom fighters like SFAlpha 2 use a special file format (I'm not aware of anything that can extract or even play them), and some more recent titles such as Burning Rangers use the .adx compression format used on most Dreamcast games (there are converters and Winamp plugins for those, so no worries).

Which is baffling since its "relatively" easily: most games use a midi-esque format with custom soundbanks.

There's a converter that can convert sequenced music files to midi and soundbanks to midi-compatible soundbanks, and an additional one to merge the two into some special whooplahoop format that is a Midi file AND a soundbank ALL IN ONE.

Problem is that the midi converter is pretty shit and the only player to support this magical midi is Winamp - provided the awesome midi plugin doesnt crash winamp outright.

If someone perfects that, we can rip pretty much all (sequenced) game music from Saturn games overnight.

Anyway, other then the formats mentioned by José, there are also some games with AIFF files on them storing music (Puyo Puyo), variants of adx (like acx which actually has multiple adx audio streams on it, Madou Monogatari uses this), and some games use a variant adpcm format (NiGHTS, Sonic Jam for music, Puyo Puyo Sun for voices). Also some games have sequenced music in some compressed format (Nights, Scorcher), but for these we can just use emulators to dump the sound ram.

AIFF is playable on anything, adx variants play back fine on Cinepak (the only proper adx player), and for adp theres a converter (acpk2avi, google it).

It appears a format for sequenced Sega Saturn music (.ssf) is officially standardized (or I finally noticed it), despite some problems (velocity and the like).

Some nice people in this thread ... =p

Looks like it's a matter of time until the pros release something official somewhere. Great news. =)

.ssf has been around for a lot of years, just nobody bothered ripping it. Now that theres an emulator that actually play games, rips started popping up - too bad there are no simple ripping tools and the players are near useless.

Could you elaborate a bit please ?

Yeah, I certainly heard of .ssf a couple of years ago, but for some reasons I assumed it had got frustrated. It's just that now someone begins to reveal a way to make .ssf files based on SSF (a Sega Saturn Emulator dating back to 2003).

I struggled to rip SoukyuGurentai, but had no idea what values its bank and track required =(

Index of /etc/htdemo

There's also a saturn emulator named SSF, emulates the machine in software, and actually has 80% or so compatibility (probably more, the last statistic I wrote was a good 30 releases back). It requires hi-end cpu tho, Core 2 and the like. Also, it dates back to 1999, not 2003 (the author actually experimented using Voodoo hardware acceleration in the beginning).

Since it emulates the Saturn well, someone made some python script that extracts the data needed by .ssf sound files from the work memory of the emulator.

Problem is that this is an insanely bothersome method, and the players suck ass (since no one bothered properly emulating the saturn sound hardware in the mame team). IMO its a bit waste of a time, since most if not all sound data can be found in the SEQ files on the saturn game disc, in rare cases they are encrypted but even then you can do a sound ram memory dump in Yabause, which contain the same sequence data.

edit
besides, most good Saturn games already have soundtrack discs released (Souky, RSG, Cotton, Sakura Taisen, etc), or used redbook... The only game with absolutely no sound rips I can think of is the Clockwork Knight series. And the menu music in Bootleg Sampler.

Well, the only Saturn game I ripped was Story of Thor 2, and the only workable way was an analog recording. It had some weird compression format.

Doesnt it use sequental music instead of 'wierd compression'? I'll check the game tomorrow.

I think it was ADX Audio. Not that I know what it means. ~_~

ADX is a middleware format and has half billion players, but, it didnt exist when Story of Thor 2 came out. Only late Saturn games used it, then Dreamcast, and then everything else up to and including the Nintendo DS.

I just checked (I'm a stupid nigger it was sitting on my hd for years), Story of Thor indeed uses sequental music.

edit:
OK I toyed around with winamp a bit, finally found a way to save midi + soundbank to wav. Does Story of Thor 2 sound something like the attached file? It probably doesn't cause the game doesnt really have any music.

Sounds like that indeed but it's kinda weird.

And it has music ... Yuzo Koshiro and all.